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Oct. 21, 2023 - Epoch Times
27:24
Why Homelessness in California is Different Compared to the Rest of US | Vern Pierson
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Some people challenged us and said, you know, you're talking about crime you're documenting, you're talking about homelessness, these are national issues.
Is there a difference between California and other states?
Absolutely there's a difference.
Most of the blue states are not having the problem that California's having.
This homelessness problem, the drug addiction problem, the theft problem.
Why are they becoming a crisis here in California?
And they're not throughout the rest of the United States.
We have to take a step back and say, what are we doing here in California that's different from everywhere else?
According to the latest report, California alone has one-third of the U.S. homeless population.
Today I sit down with Vern Pearson, District Attorney with El Dorado County, to talk about what we have done in California that led us down this path and what the possible solutions are, if there is any.
It is a handful of really bad policy decisions.
It's well-intentioned, but it's wrong.
Right now what we have is you can be arrested or cited over and over and over again, and there's no consequence.
And it's just getting worse and worse across California.
Do you think we can fix this in the future?
We have to change that.
It's not a left or right thing.
It's a common sense thing.
I'm Siamak Karami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Hi, Vern.
It's great to have you back on.
Welcome back.
Well, thank you for having me.
It's my pleasure to be here.
We've heard from some that a lot of homelessness has to do with drug addiction, and we had this covered in our documentaries.
What are your thoughts?
Well, you know, I just spent the last couple days in San Diego, a beautiful city.
And I challenge anyone who's concerned about this to walk around the streets, the best parts of San Diego, much like in LA, much like in San Francisco.
And what you will see is, you know, the classic expression of someone who's homeless is someone who's down and out on their luck.
They've lost their job.
Whatever a series of types of things happen.
That's not what you see.
What you see is people that are, and I showed you a photograph that I took this morning walking to pick up my rental car, and it is a person on one of the nicer parts of the streets of San Diego, completely oblivious, passed out on the street, if he's even still alive.
He was in such a bad condition.
But it's not just one person.
And a city can struggle to try to deal with that.
But it's not one person.
It's not ten people.
It's hundreds of people that are like that.
If you walk through any of the tent cities and any of the cities, and I call them tent cities within the city, in the state of California, you see people living in tents.
But if you look at the people and look in their eyes, you see a lost Almost like a post-apocalyptic look.
It's not somebody who's 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.
And it's just getting worse and worse across California.
If you haven't checked out CaliforniaInsider.com, we highly recommend you do that now because we're going to have a lot of news and videos there.
And on top of what we have there right now, we're building a really big platform to cover what's happening in California so you can be informed.
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Go to CaliforniaInsider.com and we'll see you there.
And now when we, some people challenged us and said, you know, you're talking about crime in your documentary, you're talking about homelessness, these are national issues.
Is there a difference between California and other states?
Absolutely, there's a difference.
Stanford recently looked at it last year.
Their School of Economics looked at it and they found over the last 10 years, most of the United States, homelessness dropped by roughly 9%.
In the same period here in the state of California, it went up by 43%.
So how can we have the rest of the United States going down in terms of homelessness?
And here in California, it's going up dramatically.
We have to take a step back and say, what are we doing here in California that's different from everywhere else?
Most of the blue states are not having the problem that being the left-leaning states.
Are not having the same type of problem that California's having.
There's something uniquely different here.
And the most notable unique difference is our decriminalizing hardcore drug use and decriminalizing large or low-level property crimes.
And is there any data on the crime side of things?
How are we doing in terms of crime compared to other states?
Most accurate crime reporting that you get in terms of there's a crime that takes place and whether or not it gets reported.
And those are very different things because we all know and it's historically been the case that some types of crimes are reported more often than other times.
Homicides, obviously, when someone is murdered, very high likelihood of that being reported.
On the property crime area, very low percentage of property crimes are being reported anymore in the state of California.
The one exception to that has to do with auto thefts.
Auto thefts are the most reliable property crime reporting in terms of crime gets committed, the percentage of those that are reported to law enforcement is very high compared to other types of property crimes.
And that's because insurance companies require people, if you submit a claim to an insurance company, and the insurance company wants a police report.
So if you look at property crimes and how much they've gone up, or vehicle thefts here in the state of California, they've gone up significantly.
So much so that on a per capita basis we are double the state of Florida.
So, you know, while the governor went and made a big show of going to the state of Florida and saying how great California is, one statistic that he's not talking about is auto thefts and that we are literally double in the state of California on a per capita basis auto thefts to that of Florida.
This is because people have to report these.
They're not reporting other crimes.
Right.
There's no report.
So remember in San Francisco a couple years ago, there was a target that started because they changed their reporting mechanism.
I don't know if it's software.
I'm not sure exactly how to do it.
But in one month, they accurately reported thefts taking place at the target in terms of when they intervened and there was an identifiable theft.
It caused throughout the state for that month, throughout the city of San Francisco, for property crimes reports to double in one month because of one target.
It's rampant.
And there's another part of it that gets overlooked.
So there's the theft.
There's the theft side of things to where The amount of money that a retailer loses when there's property stolen from a store.
There's that part of it.
And they can track that.
They call it shrinkage.
But if you talk to the retailers, particularly in cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles or San Diego, That's only part of the picture.
The other part of the picture that no one is really talking about publicly is the employees that don't want to come to work and be exposed to that because of being told, don't contact anyone, what might happen.
And the shoppers that stop coming to stores.
You just had Nordstrom's in San Francisco close after 35 years.
They're one of their hallmark stores that is a huge store in San Francisco.
Closed because theft and people not wanting to come there to shop or people not wanting to come there to work.
Those combination of stuff.
And if you walk anywhere near in that area, it's very obvious to anyone why it is that that happened.
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Now let's go back to the interview.
And Varen, you watched the documentary that we released.
What was your thoughts on it?
Well, I thought the documentary was excellent from the standpoint that it accurately portrayed things as they are.
Sadly, it's telling a story about a, you know, this is the state of California.
My daughter graduated from Pepperdine last weekend.
We're down in Pepperdine.
You're overlooking the coast.
This is the most beautiful country, the coastline, the mountains.
We have all of these things.
We have all of these natural resources.
And yet we have people every year, more people leaving than are coming to the state because of poor public policy decisions that have been made and how it's become harder and harder to live here for all the different reasons that you told in the documentary.
And I think it was very well done in telling that.
Sometimes when people See the problems, they think, okay, these are not fixable.
What are your thoughts on this?
This is a fixable problem.
I think if we take a step back, if we carefully take a look at why is it that this homelessness problem, the drug addiction problem, the theft problem, if these problems, which are all interrelated, why are they becoming a crisis, or not becoming, they have become a crisis here in California, And they're not throughout the rest of the United States.
Even in blue states, the single dividing line between us and everywhere else in that regard is the legalization of hardcore drug use, or the decriminalization of hardcore drug use, to put it that way.
That we know that people can go to a harm reduction center.
Anderson Cooper recently had a story where they focused on that, and a mother struggled to help her son, and so she went to a San Francisco harm reduction center.
And what I mean by harm reduction center is it's a center where the government, doctors, nurses, have gotten together, nonprofits, benefited by nonprofits, And they essentially say, we know that the heroin that you're taking, the fentanyl, the cocaine, the methamphetamine, whatever it might be, the very most hardcore drugs, we know that they are going to kill you.
And every time you use them, it damages your brain, damages your heart, damages your lung.
We know it will eventually kill you.
But we're going to reduce the harm sufficiently that you're not going to die today.
In other words, we'll have Narcan for you if you take too much fentanyl and we'll be able to bring you back today.
All the while knowing that eventually it is killing that person.
And when I say eventually, not too distant future, just in months or a few years, it will kill you.
So Anderson Cooper went and took a look at that, but not directly.
What he did was tell the story of a mother whose son has been going back and forth to these harm reduction centers.
And she was shocked to see it wasn't like some sterile type environment.
It was a party atmosphere of people using hardcore drugs, supervised and managed by people who know better.
And when you talk about enabling nonprofits, that is probably the best example of it.
The people running those non-profits know that this is going, the fentanyl, the heroin, whatever it is, it is going to kill those people in a relatively short period of time.
And rather than trying to get them into rehab, rather than trying to do something about it, they're simply enabling them to continue that addiction and to use those drugs knowing it will kill them.
Because it's hard to fathom or believe that they are doing that to kill these people, right?
I don't think they...
I think they're...
I think it's denial, maybe.
I don't know.
I mean, it's well-intentioned.
It's well-intentioned, but it's wrong.
In my own county, we have a...
It's called a navigation center.
It's supposed to help people that have become homeless.
I went and recently did a tour, and the person who runs it, one of the people that runs it, did the tour, And I don't know, I'll use the expression.
I thought he was going to be somebody, before I actually spent some time with him, who I would call, maybe characterize, use the expression, a do-gooder.
It's somebody who's kind of naive, thinks, you know, hey, I'm going to help the world, and this is my contribution in doing it.
And he certainly is someone who wants to help and change the world.
Unfortunately, working in that environment left him with the impression that I want to help these people, but we have to find a way to insist upon rehab.
We have to find some way to make people get into rehab and get off the drugs.
We can't just continue to enable them and look the other way.
And when I say about bad public policies, the policies are here in the state of California.
We do have a big problem with HUD. HUD used to be very helpful in dealing with this.
I think it helped exacerbate the problem HUD, in 2015-2016, decided that, when I say HUD, the Housing and Urban Development said, hey, we're a housing entity, why are we spending 60-70% of our resources on rehab for people?
And so let's get out of that business and go and do this other one.
I think that happened at a time which was critical for California to where we were already going down this housing first type and harm reduction type philosophy.
Then you exacerbate it by...
Well, you're giving the homeless housing and then you let them use the drugs and then you're not really thinking about dealing with their addiction, right?
Yeah, it's absurd.
I mean, frankly, it is absolutely absurd.
We have based all of our policy on a slogan called Housing First.
And what it says is, if you provide them housing and you provide some services to them, the person will stop using drugs, essentially.
I'm oversimplifying it.
But not much.
It's based on a model out of New York, and they said, let's replicate what New York did and this experience.
The difference is, in the state of New York, when they implemented that policy, they had social workers and other types of professionals at a ratio of between 1 in 8 and 1 in 10.
In other words, for every person that gets moved into this housing, under this housing first slogan, they had a social worker one-eighth of the time, or they had a psychologist or some other type of therapist that was available to them.
For every eight people, there was at least one.
At least one.
In the state of California, the way we tried to do it is, and particularly in San Francisco, and we've begun replicating it throughout the state of California, is at best 1 to 30 or 1 to 32.
There is no possible way a social worker, a therapist, can provide the sufficient time, energy and resources to those people.
It's not an apples to apples comparison to look at 1 to 8 versus 1 to 32.
It's frankly silly to think because it worked with 1 to 8, it's going to work with 1 to 32.
One of the things that came across to me as we were doing this documentary is that Californians, and what I've learned living here for over 20 years, Californians are very compassionate.
And this comes across in our policies.
We want to help the people that are under the streets.
What are your thoughts?
I think you're exactly right that California and Californians have been a very and continue to be a very compassionate people here in the state.
The problem is compassion isn't enough.
Is the picture I showed you that I took this morning in San Diego of a person passed out laying on the street.
Compassion isn't letting him die in that condition.
And somehow, you use the expression, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
There's all these great intentions for what to do for that person in particular, that drug addict that's laying there unconscious on the street.
But sometimes we have to be tough, and 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.
That's not compassion.
It might make someone feel good to rescue a person with Narcan, but if you continue to let them use the drugs that put them in the position in the first place, eventually it will kill them, and that's not compassionate.
Did you ever think California will become like this where people leave?
No.
There's a lot of people coming into this country right now from Central and South America looking for work.
If you look at the numbers, if we didn't have last year this huge influx of people coming into the state of California, immigrants coming to this state, our population in California would have dropped dramatically as it has for the last three or four years.
It slowed down a little bit, but that's because of the influx.
It's still A shocking thing, the most beautiful state with everything from Lake Tahoe to the coastline in Malibu to Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, San Diego, wherever you might want to pick.
It's shocking that people are leaving the state.
When you stop to think about it.
But when you analyze what's going on here, it's not hard to see that someone would say, I don't want my kids growing up where they have to get off a bus and step over a person that's either deceased from drug use or has a needle in their arm because they just injected.
I don't think it's wrong for a parent to not want to have their child there.
So when you put it in that context, as shocking as it is that this state is hemorrhaging people that way, the policies have created this and we need to do something about it.
Do you think these things that we see on the streets in San Francisco and LA, do you think they reflect the culture of the average Californian?
They do not.
Absolutely, they do not reflect the culture.
And I think it's increasingly becoming a reckoning, I think, here in California, where the Californians are going to step up and say, enough is enough.
You've tried this grand social experiment over the last eight or ten years.
It didn't work.
We need a course correction and we need to do something about it now.
What do you think will happen?
Do you think we can fix this in the future?
What are your thoughts on the future?
I think we have to, all of us, collectively need to say, as I said, this is a grand social experiment.
It was conceived out of compassion.
We thought it would make things better.
It didn't.
It's made things dramatically worse.
We need to start holding people accountable for their actions and do that by the second or third time you get arrested for a hardcore drug possession.
Either you have to go to rehab or you're going to spend some time in custody.
If you keep stealing and taking other people's property, you're going to stay in custody for some period of time.
It can't just be a decriminalized state any longer and be successful.
Now, do you think this will happen in the next five years where Californians will make a significant change in the state?
I do.
I think in the next year or two, we're going to make a course correction.
Now, what if we don't do anything about the direction we're going in?
What do you think will happen to this state?
If we don't do anything, what's going to happen is that we're going to increasingly have a state with the very wealthy who can afford to hire their own security, avoid much of the problems that we're talking about that way.
And we'll have immigrants that came from very bad conditions seeking a better life.
And I think it will become...
That will lose our middle class, frankly.
I think that's what has been happening.
Looking at the patterns of people leaving the state, it's largely our middle class that are leaving the state.
And I think that's kind of the backbone of the state.
And we need...
We need middle-class workers.
We need to have them for society to function properly.
The people who work in the stores, all of these types of things, we need those people for California to function the way it needs to and the way it has until fairly recently.
Are we the only ones among the blue states that are in this situation or are there other ones that are?
Well, one example in one city is Seattle.
Seattle is an extreme example of what's happening here in California.
Everybody, the businesses are fleeing, the people who are living there that can leave are leaving, and it is very similar to what we're doing, to where Open, rampant, hardcore drug use.
Little or no consequence for property crimes.
And they also have a horrendous problem with law enforcement staffing.
They simply can't hire law enforcement officers because of, frankly, the way they've treated them.
It is a handful of really bad policy decisions that created this problem and have caused it.
And we really do hear that From retailers.
And they say...
Everybody keeps talking about the theft being the main problem.
And that is a problem.
It's a big problem here in California.
But when we have employees in, let's say, Nordstrom...
If you talk to the people in Nordstrom in San Francisco...
Their employees, they have no employees because no one wants to work there.
They don't want to come.
Because where am I going to park?
My car is going to get broken into.
I'm going to get assaulted.
I'm going to panhandle.
All the different types of stuff.
And then who's shopping in the store?
If you walk around, there's no one in the store.
Yeah.
You grew up here, right?
I did.
And how does all this make you feel in seeing all these problems that we have?
It's sad.
I mean, it really is, frankly.
As someone who has, my family has grown up here, my kids, they want to live here, I want to live here, and yet I have my friends over and over like everybody else, all of us, you have friends, that they're either leaving California or talking about leaving California.
I try to encourage them and say, hey, we have to stay and fight.
We have to point out these poor public policies.
Do you think these problems will go away fast if these laws changed?
I do.
I think it could be as soon as a year or two.
If you had it in effect today, if you just look at why we're different, Then other jurisdictions and where the changes are.
What makes us different from this state?
And use the blue states, you know, the red and blue type stuff.
What makes us different?
They did not decriminalize hardcore drug use like we did.
They may have done versions of it, but nowhere extreme is what we have here in California.
And the property crimes are not treated the same way in other states.
Just those two things, I believe, would have a major impact.
Now, do you have any other thoughts for our audience?
Well, I think, like you, I love California.
I don't want to leave.
I think we have to get together and fix it.
And I think it can be fixed.
It 100% can be fixed.
And it need not take, you know, a lifetime to do it.
But if the legislature doesn't have the will to do what's right, then we as Californians need to make it happen.
Do you think there will be any measures coming soon that is going to impact?
I do.
I do.
I think when you've lost Anderson Cooper on CNN, who is hardly a right-wing guy.
I mean, he's pretty far to the left, let's say.
And when you've lost him, when he's doing stories about how misguided California has become, I think you're reaching a point of critical mass where It's not a left or right thing.
It's a common sense thing.
Vern Pearson, District Attorney of Eldorado County, it was great to have you back on California Insider.
Well, thank you for having me.
A pleasure talking about these very important issues.
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