California Crime Sprees

California cities are so saturated with crime, they are losing their largest and oldest retailers, while Midwest small towns are losing their entire police forces. At least, one is, which is in the middle of Don’t-Fund-Me Minnesota, which believed it could have safer cities if it defunded police forces. So, the entire police department in one Minnesota town just up and quit. All gone once the chief’s two-week notice is up.

The town, Goodhue, says it is surprised. They just offered the force a whopping 5% raise to keep the officers on, and the officers had the gall to reject their obvious generosity. Problem is Goodhue is not so good; they are greedy, tight-fisted little town council bastards who have under-funded for so long that their town would have to raise its pay 40% just to match up to its neighbors!

The town, it turns out, offers a whopping $22 per hour. Neighboring towns pay $30. When you consider that, with minimum wage laws, you can make $15 an hour just flipping burgers at McD’s, who is going to put their life on the line for a bunch of people who hate your guts when you do what it takes to enforce the law? The town is shocked because it lives in denial of reality.

These little Minnesota towns are not so lovely as they like to think they are. Better not any cop shoot someone who is trying to wrestle the gun out of his hand. A good cop is supposed to wait, according to liberals, until the criminal first takes a shot at him so he can prove he had to kill the criminal in self-defense. How else will you know it was necessary? The fact that he was fighting with you certainly has not been enough in many cases.

For example, it is not enough in liberal-run towns today that someone is walking away from a convenience store that just called in an armed robbery and he then dives into an officer’s squad-car window and tries to wrestle the gun out his holster. The officer knocks him aside with the car door, and the young crook runs but then turns and runs back at the officer. The officer was expected to wait until the nice lad, as he was described by all who knew him, actually got close enough to where one last leap would be able to shove the officer to the ground.

So, it is not surprising that Goodhue thinks its cops should be happy to put themselves in harm’s way for 22 bucks an hours. They are shocked that their generosity was so easily disregarded.

Goodhue is the latest small Minnesota community that’s struggling to keep up with law enforcement demands amid increasing budget costs and an ongoing shortage of officers.

Last year, the police department in Morris was disbanded after a turbulent few months during which the department eroded to just the chief and one other officer.

What a surprise that Defund-Me Minnesota is experiencing a shortage of police officers. Surely, no one could see that coming. You’d think a lot more people would want to enter this largely hated and underpaid profession. Wouldn’t you? Minnesota does!

The Golden State is going broke because it broken

The problems are, of course, much worse in the liberated state of California, which imports law-breakers from across the southern border to its cities of refuge. That is the raw truth of it because, if you are an illegal alien, you are by definition someone willing to break the laws of the land. In fact, you are someone who is in a state of actively breaking the laws of the land.

That state would be California — where they do not have enough people but also do not have enough water, so they are doing their best to import more of both because they are smart like that. They could, of course, just sensibly say, “This is all the water our state has, and we are not reaching beyond our boundaries to bring in more, so we’re full now.” They should have said that fifty years ago, but growth forever and expansion of human misery forever is their benign agenda. They, of course, do not see that because they live in denial.

So, the news this morning from California is riddled with flash mobs busting into major stores with no concern whatsoever about the law. In fact, they casually stop and pick up things that fall out of their thieving garbage bags as they are walking away. Then again, why would you expect illegal people to be concerned about the law? The more appropriate question would be why would you expect a state that seeks to enable people to be illegal by sheltering those who break federal laws to be concerned about rule of law?

In one story, we read about a flash mob invading Nordstrom in L.A. in “overwhelming numbers with brute force.” Thirty masked robbers ransacked the top brands of purses, clothing and jewelry.

Of course, California has become one of those many places in the US that now regularly chains up all their merchandise to prevent thievery, which has become so prevalent, and to create a welcoming shopping environment:

The sound of glass display cases thrown to the ground sounded like gunshots, said a Nordstrom employee who had a clear line of sight of the robbery. She told customers to run to a back room in case the robbery turned violent.

The thieves snatched designer items, undeterred by the chains and cables binding the wares. Shelving was yanked apart. Some dragged display cabinets still attached to high-priced accessories toward the store doors.

What do you know? The thieves had no respect for the chains and cables because locks only keep the good people honest. It is sort of like when you ban guns in a state like California: It never occurs to the liberal politicians that the people who kill people with guns are not going to turn in their guns. Only the honest people will. So, all you do is disarm the generally harmless ones and keep the heavily armed thieves thoroughly equipped. However, these guys proved you don’t even need guns; just numbers.

The story, as can be expected by the mainstream liberal media, dishonestly reports,

Overall crime rates in Los Angeles are down from last year, and a recent surge in smash-and-grab robberies makes up little of the overall problem of retail thefts.

Oh, “crimes” are down all right, but the dishonesty is in representing that as if to say the number of incidents like this are down. No, what happened is that certain major cities in CA like L.A and San Fran, raised the bar on what it takes to be called a crime. The dollar-value of the theft was raised, so that lower-value crimes have been downgraded by law to misdemeanors. Naturally then, these big-city DAs can boast they cut the crime rate in their city (by defining it out of existence).

Now, they claimed at the time of their downgrades they had to do this because there are so many more important crimes for them to deal with. Of course, that is how you get to so many important crimes — by not aggressively nipping the smaller crimes in the bud with some serious arrests and jail time to show you care.

The brazen Nordstrom robbery was captured on video and quickly became national news — and more fodder in the debate over how to respond to retail crime that is roiling big cities including L.A., San Francisco and New York.

Oh, how to deal with it isn’t hard at all to figure out. It’s just how to get liberals to deal with it that is hard. It’s getting the basic common sense to deal with it that seems to be almost impossible.

"What can stores do to be safer?" said Ani Chittle, 77, a Westfield Topanga mall regular who was drinking coffee outside the Nordstrom on Monday with her husband. "We are not overreacting to the robberies and I'm not so scared that I have changed my habits to visit here."

Of course, you are not overreacting to them! You are under-reacting to them. That is what Californians do. We expect that of you.

"The most disheartening thing here is that this is what we've come to hear in L.A.," said LAPD Cmdr. Gisselle Espinoza. "We are interviewing people and trying to find leads and strategies to find out who these people are."

It’s what you’ve created! You fill your cities with people who defy the law because you, yourselves, refuse to live by the rule of law under the federal government. You’re already overfull, but you beg for more lawbreakers to come and you shelter them. Then, whether it is those individuals doing these particular crimes or not (as I don’t know any better than the police there do who did this, and I don’t have the resources to go “interview” them), you dumb down your laws and defund your police departments; but hey, the police are, at least, still willing to interview people. That is a good talent to have in Hollywood where maybe you can move from policing to hosting a TV show.

Meanwhile, not too far away, the Nike store was being robbed, too.

Brazen thieves ransack LA Nike store in front of shocked shoppers…

Why would you be shocked to find the thieves in LA are brazen? What is to be afraid of? Who is going to stand in their way? Unarmed citizens? Defunded police? Courts with revolving doors? DAs that cannot be bothered with the little stuff? The police are all busy interviewing people and filling out reports to prove with statistics that crime is down. That’s what is important. At least, to Californian politicians.

In this case, there were only three crooks — a man and two women. The losses at Nordstrom were reportedly $300,000, so a third of million. All this threesome wanted, though, was a five-finger discount on some tennis shoes. They got away with around $1,000 worth. Now if the true amount is a decimal shy of $1,000, the old retail pricing trick of marking that as $999.99 marks that down from a crime to a misdemeanor. So, no big deal. Not even worth conducting interviews, I imagine.

Down and out in Beverly Hills

It would be easy to deal with this if you were willing to get seriously tough and also stand by any officer defending himself or using brute strength to get someone to submit to arrest if they were resisting without fearing he’ll be jailed for it. (And, no, I am not talking about things like the obvious execution-by-cop that happens when you keep your knee on someone’s throat long after he has stopped resisting because he is clearly unconscious.)

It is as easy as it is to deal with the homelessness of drug addicts: You tell them whenever you find them sleeping on the street, “We have this really nice facility we have created because we are a compassionate society. It is comfortable and homelike. It provides you with drugs that make it easier to avoid severe withdrawal. And it gives good counseling on how to break your addiction and get your life back together. However, you have to commit yourself to stay there until you are completely detoxified, and you have to fully participate in the available counseling. We paid a lot of money to create this facility, so it is very nice.

“Otherwise, we have another facility that we didn’t pay much for, which you can choose you by simply declining to fully participate in the treatment program. It’s a jail, but it doesn’t have high security. It’s a warehouse with a padlock and cyclone-fence cells inside. You get a comfortable cot, three meals a day and running water … with a toilet even. You will stay here the same amount of time as the other facility because we will involuntarily commit you because we can, but you get absolutely no help with drugs or counsel; and, if you die because of that, that is entirely on you.”

Leaders have to have the guts to let people choose to kill themselves and accept that is THEIR choice because you ARE offering a far better alternative. You cannot save people from themselves if they will not participate in the effort. After the third or fourth time of getting scooped off a park bench and run through six weeks of detox with no drug support, they will (if they live, and most will live) probably get real tired of the endless loop and will choose the participation route. In the meantime, you’ve cleaned them all out of the streets and parks at minimal cost because cyclone fences are not that expensive, nor are temperature-controlled warehouses.

You do not need maximum security for everything, and you did give them a comfortable alternative. So, no cruel or unusual punishment. Well, it might be unusual because punishment of any kind is getting to be unusual in California.

The Olden Golden City

The painted lady ain’t what she used to be. If you don’t have the guts to get seriously tough with a compassionate alternative for those who will take it, you decline in your old age to this:

166-year-old luxury retailer in San Francisco warns: This could be our last year

Gump’s San Francisco wrote an open letter to Governor Newsom, Mayor London Breed, and the city’s Board of Supervisors, pleading for them to act on what he describes as the city’s worsening downtown conditions….

“The ramifications of Covid policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood. Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.”

Gee, you would think such kindness to the homeless would ever become a problem? Yet, there it is clogging up the city’s economic engines so the city serves no one. One of its oldest and most famous retailers is about to pull up stakes because it sees its namesake city as nearly hopeless.

San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and the San Francisco board of supervisors’ offices did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Of course not … because their liberal answers are bankrupt and they don’t want to take the blame for the cesspool they’ve created. However, this is not just an isolated incident that looks bad:

Gump’s would be one of many retailers in San Francisco’s downtown Union Square neighborhood to close its doors in recent years.

The city’s liberal politicians have turned the old glamor gal into a dust bin. SF used to be my favorite US city, but I have no interest in ever visiting it again unless it thoroughly wipes the drool off it decrepit mouth.

Well-known chain stores like Whole Foods, Anthropologie, Office Depot, and CB2 have also ceased operations in the city’s downtown since the start of the pandemic. In total, more than 39 retail stores have shuttered in San Francisco’s Union Square.

Of course, both the Gov. and the mayor were big on forcing totalitarian lockdowns in the belief that you can command and control and not lose the business that gives you all your vitality and strength. Liberals love to live in pretend like that. So, they shut down everything again and again, except homeless camps, which grew in size and number and practiced no social distancing; but, hey, the city’s bright leaders gave them free needles so they wouldn’t have to share their manifold diseases. That clearly helped.

In June, shopping mall operator Westfield announced it would give up control of its San Francisco mall, citing “challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic.”

One month earlier, one of that mall’s biggest retailers, Nordstrom, said it would shutter both of its San Francisco stores, attributing its decision to the “dramatically” changing dynamics of the city’s downtown.

You can blame this rapid death spiral of the old lady on the lack of policing and defunding of police departments or on the strictly enforced policing of all-important Covid policies, but the end results even of the Covid policies is vast destruction of humanity. People without jobs don’t survive well, and the jobs are fleeing town rapidly.

Office vacancies in the city are at a 30-year high, and many people have permanently left; San Francisco County’s population declined by more than 60,000 people from 2020 to 2022, according to US Census estimates.

Who woulda thought the people would just get the heck out of Dodge?

And who would have thought tourists would stop coming:

The decline of in-person work coupled with diminished tourism to San Francisco during the pandemic has translated to shrinking foot traffic in the city’s once-bustling downtown retail center.

Emblematic of Californian thinking, we read of similar thought processes in Maui today. Where people think they are doing good by increasingly telling tourists to get the heck out of Dodge, too. Not sure how the people there think the Hawaiian-owned tourist businesses will survive with about a 80% plunge in customers. Many small businesses on Maui are owned by locals and cater to tourists. Not sure why they think crippling those local businesses so they have no power to help out will empower those in Lahaina. Not sure why they think hotels will stay open without tourist or how closing those resort jobs and firing more people will be doing the people of Lahaina any good since they will be needing work elsewhere but won’t have anywhere to go to and won’t have friends or family who can afford to help them. However, people think with their emotions, not their brains. And that is what California does.

Hawaii and California are a couple of the very most liberal states in the US, so go figure. Who can be surprised by their self-destructive tendencies? They are also both well-known for their beaches. California’s famous beaches are now being ransacked by wild furries. California’s society has gone insane, but it is far too insane to realize it.

Coming up

China dominates economic headlines again today, and I’ll be going over how important that is for the US economy later this week. In brief, the headlines are that a major Chinese financial institution, compared in size to Blackstone, has, in fact, defaulted on several financial instruments that it manages. Its investors complain in outrage that “liquidity has suddenly dried up.”

That, of course, is the kind of thing you hear when the banking industry of any country starts to freeze up, and that is because this is a problem endemic to the entire Chinese banking industry. That is why The People’s Bank of China, today, also put out an urgent plea for “helicopter money” to save the nation’s economy. That means the kind of team effort we saw in the US between the US government and the Federal Reserve during the Covid lockdowns to get money directly into the hands of businesses and people, not just banks. Central banks can get money into the hands of banks, but it takes governments to move money directly to businesses and people via grants and welfare.

China is looking grim right now; and, as the second-largest economy in the world, that will have global repercussions. Unsurprisingly, US stocks tried to pump themselves up this morning, in spite of this news, but are falling again while bond interest is soaring again.

Since the Fed is in the news today saying its own economists have wiped recession off their forecast, I’ll also talk in that “Deeper Dive” about why the “resilient economy” Powell claims as his basis for “no recession” misunderstands where the recession is coming from. It won’t be from jobs drying up and crimping consumers. It will be financial — created by the Fed in its own banks and in corporate credit.