Newsom's latest effort to derail crime-fighting ballot initiative

SACRAMENTO, California — California Gov. Gavin Newsom will today enact a package of bills to combat retail theft, the latest gambit in a desultory, nearly year-long effort by statewide Democrats to sap momentum from a tough-on-crime initiative.

The bills Newsom signs into law will pursue many of the same aims as Proposition 36, which rolls back parts of a decade-old criminal justice reform measure by increasing penalties for certain theft and drug offenses, without requiring voter approval. The new laws enable prosecutors to add up the value of goods stolen in different locations to more easily meet the threshold for felony grand theft and create a new category for offenses by organized-crime rings.

Newsom and Democrats in the Legislature had originally designed the retail theft package this spring as a form of leverage in negotiations with the coalition of local prosecutors, big-box retailers and grocery chains which had placed the measure off the November ballot.

But after those efforts failed to produce a compromise ahead of the June 27 deadline — and after Newsom scrapped plans to introduce a rival ballot initiative of his own — top Democrats opposed to Prop 36 have turned their attention to trying to drain the measure’s funding sources.

Retailers like Walmart, Target and Home Depot contributed millions to qualify the measure for the ballot, and are generally expected to provide financial backing for the Yes on 36 campaign as it turns to persuading voters.

Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas told reporters earlier this week that he’s “optimistic” the bills signed into law today will encourage some retailers to abandon their support. “I think this is a strong package of bills,” he said.

They are the product of a process that began while backers of Prop 36 were still collecting signatures to qualify their initiative for the ballot. Rivas launched a select committee on the issue in the Assembly last fall with the mandate to develop legislation; the Senate introduced a package of bills on public safety in February, and the Assembly followed suit in April.

In both cases, the bill’s authors argued that they could address the issue without amending Proposition 47 , which would require another ballot initiative since the changes were originally enacted in 2014 by voters.

When they struggled to bring prosecutors to the negotiating table, Democrats attempted a series of machinations that would force voters to choose between the two different sets of reforms through so-called “poison pill” inoperability clauses and then a potential countermeasure. Both of those ploys were abandoned, and Democrats decided to move forward this month by passing the laws without conditions.

In addition to creating new theft-related crime categories, the bills signed into law today would empower police to make arrests without having witnessed a crime or having footage of it. Rivas contrasted the package, for which he and other legislative leaders “built a broad group of stakeholders,” with Prop 36, which he called a “very one-sided, not an inclusive process.”

Now Rivas, Newsom, Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire and other Democratic lawmakers involved in the process hope their enactment can placate business interests that helped propel the initiative to the ballot.

Rachel Michelin, head of the California Retailers Association, told POLITICO last week that the group’s members — which include a range of large and small businesses — are “thrilled” about the package, particularly parts that address issues not included in Prop 36. It could indeed prompt some to pull future funding from the Yes on 36 campaign, she said.

“We'll see what happens from an individual perspective,” she said. “But I think that you might see some of them not necessarily supporting financially.”