Investigating the Root Causes of California’s Crime Spike | CLIP | American Thought Leaders

There is no accountability. You can go and steal whatever you want and walk out of the store and do it again the next day. If it's below $950, it's a misdemeanor. Today I sit down with Siamak Karami, host of California Insider, to discuss his new documentary, California Crime Wave, which is now streaming on Epoch TV. In California government, we are seeing the same culture that I saw in China, where nobody admits to a failure. What's causing the sharp rise in crime in California, and why are official statistics grossly inaccurate? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Siamak Karami, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you, Jan. It's great to be here in the California Insider studio, and I've been really loving your new documentary, California Crime Wave. That was actually kind of shocking to me at many levels. I have heard that there's an increase in crime in California. I know that. But there's one thing that really stuck out to me, and this was one of the folks being interviewed, basically asserts that based on a number of pieces of legislation, it's almost become legal to steal in California. So tell me about this. There's a lot of different laws that have been passing over the last decade that has made it very easy for criminals to commit crimes and not face any consequences. Now, theft is not legal. There's a threshold of if it's below $950, it's a misdemeanor. And what happens is that if you steal something that's below $950, sometimes you see people walking into a store with a calculator, calculating and adding up how much they're stealing. If it's below $950, then if you get caught, you will get a citation and you have to go to court, but they won't take you to jail because the jails are full. So you'll be out and you can go and commit the crime again. There's even cases that somebody gets caught three times in a day. There's no consequences for repeat offending. You can keep going and keep going. It's fascinating because these laws ostensibly were enacted for good reasons. Because it started with there being too many people in prison for too long for crimes that perhaps didn't warrant as serious responses. That's kind of what comes through in here. Yes, yes. So we had this three strikes law where if you committed three crimes, and then you could go to jail for life. And there was a case where somebody had stolen a donut, and then they ended up going to jail. Then that was the consequence. So the public didn't want to do that anymore. So Californians wanted to become more relaxed. And there was a shift in Californians wanting to focus more on rehabilitation. Because there's a big cost when people go to prison. It costs almost $110,000 when somebody goes to jail per year for inmates. So that's more than going to an Ivy League school. So Californians wanted to change that. But it seems like all of these laws that were passed together, they are making it very easy for criminals to commit crime. And almost there's no consequences for them. So what is the reality of crime in California now? If you look at the statistics, the statistics are saying crime is okay, where crime is not up. It's like almost down in certain areas for most part, and everything is fine. But if you really dig into the statistic and analyze it, so the statistics are saying we had eight shopliftings per day in San Francisco. And one security guard of one store told us that he saw 20 shopliftings in this just one store in one day. And there's 10,000 stores in San Francisco. If there was only eight cases per day, all of San Francisco, 14 Walgreens wouldn't shut down. It tells you that the statistics is not connected to the reality. So like eight cases of shoplifting, as we dug more into it, we were told that this is probably the violent ones. That's what is getting reported. If they're not extreme, they may not get reported because there's no consequences. You're not going to get the stuff you lost back. Why bother? Another thing that was really interesting in there is that there is one statistic that you can't fake. It's the murders, the murder rate. What we realize is the murder rates are significantly higher. They're almost double in two years. You can't hide the body when there's a body. And in almost 100% of cases, people have to call the police and report a murder. That's why this number can be trusted. Based on our conversations with the experts, usually if the murder rates are up, all the other types of crimes are up as well. So essentially, crime is skyrocketed. But the statistics and the data is not showing this rise. Now, is this wishful thinking? Is this underreporting? Or is this intentional? So there is a multiple of these factors. First of all, different departments have different data. Some district attorneys, they have their data to show that crime is down because they want to show that their approach is correct. So different departments have different data. And sometimes they don't share the data with each other. But there is a factor of that. There is also a factor of people not reporting the crime because they don't want to call the police if somebody broke into their car because what's going to happen? There's no consequences. They're not going to get their stuff back. It's a waste of time. There is another element of it is you might be afraid of the consequences. So you may not want to report it. If you report it, you may face consequences by the criminal. If you know the criminal, if they know you, you may not want to call the police for it. So there is a mixture of reasons why the data is not right. What about zero bail? What is that? So they want to actually have you pay no bail. So they say bail is racist. And essentially, if you don't have the money and when you commit a crime, you have to put bail to get out and then go back to the justice system, right? You have to go back to the court. But if you don't have the money to put the bail, then you're discriminated against because you don't have the money to put the bail. And so if you're poor and you don't have money, then you're not able to put bail and you will go to jail versus somebody that has the money, they can put the bail. But they don't really question the fact that it was your choice to commit the crime. If you commit the crime, then you have to pay up for the consequences. So they've come up with this idea that we should eliminate bail. And what it can do is there'll be no consequences. You commit a crime, you have to show up for court, but there's no bail. You can go back to committing other crimes. California is one place where defunding the police was a slogan that was heard a lot. So how much did that actually happen and what was the impact? I think in some of the cities, LA and San Francisco, the defunding did happen. And as a result of it, what it did is a lot of politicians in LA, the mayor came out and said the police are murderers. So he made a comment like that and he tried to backtrack it. And they defunded the police. And in San Francisco, they did defund the police and took some of that funding and they wanted to spend it in other ways in the community. What happened based on our research, what we saw on the ground is that a lot of the police became demoralized because defunding the police is not just about the funding. It's about, oh, do we want to invest in the police or not? And a lot of the police are short-staffed now because people from the police force, because policing is a very difficult job to do. The type of calls that you have to go on. Every day you wake up, you deal with the craziest things in the society you have to deal with. You get called. And so a number of officers in San Francisco quit. A lot of people retired early. In LA, the same thing happened. As a result of that movement, the dignity of police officers and the role they play and the pride in their job got questioned.