LA County jails are overcrowded. "Let's just cut them loose"

Nick Ut

There are more than a few stories about problems with law enforcement in California making the rounds lately. This one is a tale of something that didn’t wind up happening, but it was close. Despite the number of criminals who are ignored or quickly released in Los Angeles County, the police there have still managed to arrest enough suspects to lead to some crowded conditions in the county’s jails. But rather than funding the construction of new jails or shifting some prisoners around to other facilities, Los Angeles County Supervisors Lindsey Horvarth and Hilda Solis came up with a different idea. They wanted the county to “declare the state of mental health services and overcrowding in the Los Angeles County jails a humanitarian crisis.” Their solution? To “depopulate” the jails, of course. But when word of the plan went public, the ensuing outrage caused them to scrap the idea. (CBS Los Angeles)

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The Los Angeles County jails are facing an overcrowding crisis, prompting a proposal by a county supervisor to release some inmates. Critics of the plan say that it could be dangerous for public safety.

The proposal, submitted by Los Angeles County Supervisors Lindsey Horvarth and Hilda Solis, wants the county to “Declare the state of mental health services and overcrowding in the Los Angeles County jails a humanitarian crisis.”

Some experts said the proposed plan to depopulate and survey L.A. County jails, — to release inmates and find alternatives — is dangerous.

One deputy district attorney protested the plan in a rare example of common sense. (“Rare” by California standards, anyway.) Eric Siddall pointed out that prisoners eligible for the “cite and release” program would have included domestic violence abusers, robbers, and career criminals charged with gun crimes. Other prosecutors stepped forward to agree with him.

The plan was supposed to come up for a vote tonight. But Hilda Solis pulled it from the agenda yesterday after the story hit the papers, saying she wanted to return it to her office so she can “gather input from all stakeholders.”

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It’s not hard to see what was being attempted here. This is just the latest version of the “empty the jails” movement which failed to entirely disappear even after significant public outcry. But proponents of the idea clearly learned something from their experiences during the pandemic. At that time, they declared a “state of emergency” because the prisoners couldn’t be protected from COVID. And they used that excuse as a reason to release huge numbers of convicts.

Now the pandemic is behind us, so the liberal officials in Los Angeles County wanted to use the same technique. They wanted to effectively declare a “state of emergency” in the jails based on mental health services and overcrowding. This is the trick that too many officials with authoritarian impulses took away from the lockdowns. All you need to do is declare a state of emergency and the normal rules of order go out the window. Executive actions replace the representational legislative process. And these two women were hoping to seize that power to put hundreds or even thousands of dangerous criminals back on the streets.

You really have to keep a close eye on these weasels at all times. If nobody had spoken up and gone to the press, they probably would have gotten away with it. And I have no doubt whatsoever that they’ll try something similar again when they believe nobody is watching.

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