It is hard to believe that CA residents have accepted crime as "just the cost of living in paradise"!
Ten years ago would we have allowed mail boxes at Post Offices to be broken into, now Postal Workers to be robbed, retail stores looted with impunity and the streets filled with addicts & criminals.
Our elected officials should all be thrown out & we must start with new leadership. Continuing on in is direction will destroy the working class in CA!

Cybervoter:

In this particular case we have the voters that were stupid enough to vote to reduce penalties for crime and raise the level at which theft becomes a felony to blame. The voters voted for this nonsense and now we all get to reap what the sowed.

I respectfully disagree with the above comments. They read like emotional "entitled" rants to me. No one is accepting crime as "a cost of doing business". Nor is there any evidence that long sentences without rehabilitation available has done anything to lessen crime. WE DID try that for the last 20-25 years or so. What we need are stronger communities, education, and real opportunities outside of drugs and crime that are accessible to all. Blaming your neighbors who you feel have left your reactionary minority behind electorally is not a solution.

Identity theft through stolen mail has been a major problem in our high-tech online world for years. That is why most of us have long since stopped putting sensitive outgoing mail in our mailboxes, and it is the reason that our important financial statements no longer arrive with our full account numbers or Social Security numbers listed.

One high tech solution would be for the US Post Office to revamp all Mail Drop-off boxes with encoded electronic locks. Even if a "key" were stolen, such locks could be reprogrammed to stop responding to the old, stolen codes. It might not be cheap to make such a change over, but it would be well worth the expense in the long run—and it would be much cheaper and more effective than building more prisons.

Jon Silver

(I am old school and out of style I know, but I believe in putting my name behind my words, and further I believe doing so is an essential part of building more decent communities and a healthier body politic.)

Jon:

if the uptick in property crimes, especially "petty" theft, isn't due to the passage of Prop 47 and others, to what do you attribute it? It was an unintended consequence I don't think voters counted on when they voted for it. Now we are reaping what they have sown.

Dear Menlo [Park] Voter,

While I don’t pretend to be omniscient on this point (or any other), I expect it has had something to do with social factors, which I do not think are well understood yet, that led to a rise in crime rates all over the United States, in Red and Blue states alike. The level of punitiveness, or even of the number of those put to death, seemed to make no difference. Also, sadly—tragically—I suspect our other pandemic, that is the opioid plague is a major cause of crime and premature death.

The new synthetic opioids are so potent and small (odorless?), and difficult to detect that an enormous supply comes through our legal ports of entry every day. Meanwhile numerous addicts are put on long waiting lists for treatment for their addictive disease. Treatment that they have in desperation requested. All this while there is no waiting list for a cell in an overcrowded prison with no treatment or rehabilitation for these sick and wretched people. (Yes, degraded as they may be they are still people, and our brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and children.)

This is a tragic and unsustainable situation that will not be solved by fear or force. It can be solved through care, compassion, and brotherhood. What would Jesus or Gandhi do?

I know what I want to try to do. I’ll bet on love and caring any day.

With best wishes to all,

Jon Silver

@Jon Silver I applaud your efforts to better understand the social dynamics of what makes a criminal I'm afraid I have none of that empathy. As a victim of multiple criminal incidents I can honestly say I don't care what happens to even the most petty criminals. They've cost me time and money and in every instance nothing has happened to the criminal. My tax dollars flood into "solutions" that don't do a damn thing. Meanwhile I have elderly members of my family who are afraid to go shopping. Enough already. Fill the deserts with prisons, and let the people reap what they sow.

I hear the sheriff's department is critically short staffed and they are taking people off the street to work in the court house. I don't see as many sheriffs as I used to..

gtspencer:

virtually every police department in this area is short staffed. Given the current climate and constant second guessing of their actions which could result in job loss or worse, incarceration, no one wants to do the job. Why would they?

menlovoter: It sounds like you're arguing that to get people to be willing to work in law enforcement we need to allow them to do all the bad things that have been in the news: kill, torture, beat up, shoot in the back, shoot blindly through walls, shoot children with toys, etc., (and then lie about it in their reports), with no consequences. Clearly these things have been happening for many years (probably not in your neighborhood or to your friends), but cell phone and body cameras have made us all aware of what many people experienced daily. Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far, but there must be a middle way where law enforcement can do their job, but they have to operate within some boundaries of decency. (It seems that Sheriff Corpus "gets it" on all this).

David B:

I'm not suggesting anything of the kind. I am suggesting the same thing you did, the pendulum has swung too far. Police are required to make split second decisions, often life or death ones, and they are then reviewed in the calm of an office where the reviewers are in no danger and not involved in a life or death situation with almost no time to make a decision. A decision, that in the heat of the moment, if wrong, could cost an officer his or her life. It's easy to sit back when you're not in the situation and judge how it "should" have been done. And that is the problem. You have people, often with NO experience in law enforcement, passing judgement on officers that had to make a split second decision. And that judgement could cost them their job or their freedom when all they were doing was their job.

The police are sometimes met with violence, in fact, it is probably more often than you can imagine and that violence has to be met with violence. It's not pretty and to those that aren't used to seeing it, it's shocking. Unfortunately, it is also necessary to maintain peoples' safety and control crime. That is not to suggest that police have a free hand to assault people whenever they feel like it, but the fact is they do have to do violence and in today's current climate that is judged harshly, and in my opinion, often unfairly.

I spent ten years in law enforcement in the 80's and 90's. I have experience and know what it is like to do the job. I would never recommend the job to anyone right now. In fact, anyone that asks what I think about them going into law enforcement I tell them don't do it. It's bad enough going to work every day having to worry about whether or not you will be coming home, but to have the added burden of potentially being misjudged and losing your job or freedom? Forget it. It's not worth it.