Jill McLaughlin and Siyamak Khorrami June 28, 2023
California continues to pour billions of dollars into addressing the state’s burgeoning homeless population, but that won’t solve the problem, according to the district attorney for El Dorado County, located east of Sacramento.
The state’s drug and crime policies are mostly to blame, District Attorney Vern Pierson told EpochTV’s “California Insider” in “Why Homelessness is California is Different Compared to the Rest of the U.S.”
“There’s something uniquely different here,” Pierson said. “The most notable unique difference is our decriminalizing hardcore drug use and decriminalizing low-level property crime.”
The only way to turn the trend around would be for Californians to join together and fix these two state policies that allow and encourage illegal substance use and criminal behavior, he said.
Most “blue” states—those with a majority of Democratic Party leaders—don’t have the same problem with homelessness as California. A study published in May 2022 by Stanford University found the homeless crisis was associated with high housing costs, inadequate shelter space, closure of mental health institutions and psychiatric hospitals in the 1960s, drug abuse, and a change in state laws reducing many crimes as lesser offenses.
As a result, the Golden State’s homeless counts rose by 42 percent between 2014 and 2020, while the rest of the country had a 9 percent decrease, according to the study.
Last week, Pierson walked through San Diego’s downtown area. What he found were hundreds of people living in tents addicted to drugs and suffering from mental illness.
He challenged others who are concerned about the homeless problem to witness it first-hand.
“If you look at the people and look in their eyes … it’s almost like a post-apocalyptic look,” Pierson said. “It’s not somebody who has lost their job or lost their housing. It’s someone who is addicted to drugs, in large part have fried their brains. They’re suffering from mental illness. Maybe they had the mental illness before, but it’s certainly been made worse because of the drug addiction.”
The problem is getting worse across the state, he said.
California’s city streets and coastal areas are home to about one-third of the nation’s homeless and half of the unsheltered population, according to a new study conducted by the University of California–San Francisco.
More than 171,000 people experience homelessness daily in the Golden State, which is at least two times more than any other state, the study found.
Californians have to take a step back and ask themselves what the state is doing differently than everywhere else, according to Pierson.
One way to do that is to measure the increase in property crimes—however, a very low percentage of property crimes are reported in the state, he added. One exception is auto theft reporting, because insurance companies require it.
“If you look at vehicle thefts, they have gone up significantly,” Pierson said. “So much so, that on a per-capita basis, [the state has] double the state of Florida.”
Larger cities in the state have also had retail crime waves in the past few years. Organized retail crime and homeless encampments around downtown areas have caused several larger chain stores to close in San Francisco and Los Angeles. The problems are driving away customers and employees who are afraid to go to work, he said.
“If you walk anywhere near that area, it’s very obvious to anyone why that happened,” Pierson said.
“California and Californians continue to be a very compassionate people,” Pierson said. “The problem is, compassion isn’t enough. … Sometimes compassion isn’t letting someone die in a ditch somewhere. Compassion isn’t letting someone lay on the street with a needle in their arm.
“If you continue to let them use the drug that put them in the position in the first place, eventually it will kill them and that’s not compassionate,” he said.
The problem is fixable, though, and it starts with holding people accountable for their actions. Otherwise, people and businesses will continue leaving the state, Pierson added.
“It’s increasingly becoming a reckoning, I think, here in California,” he said. “Californians are going to step up and say enough is enough … you’ve tried this grand social experiment over the last eight or 10 years. It didn’t work. We need a course correction, and we need to do something about it now.”
