George Hofstetter is President of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. ALADS is the collective bargaining agent and represents more than 8,200 deputy sheriffs and district attorney investigators working in Los Angeles County.
Governor Brown’s misleading campaign for his initiative which will lead to the early release of inmates convicted of sex offenses and other violent crimes hit a new low in the past week. The Governor’s campaign refused to appear with me on Newsmakers, the award-winning public affairs show hosted by Adrienne Alpert. The Governor’s office told the show’s producers that they would not have anyone appear at the same time with any person opposing the initiative.
Governor Brown’s misleading campaign for his initiative which will lead to the early release of inmates convicted of sex offenses and other violent crimes hit a new low in the past week. The Governor’s campaign refused to appear with me on Newsmakers, the award-winning public affairs show hosted by Adrienne Alpert. The Governor’s office told the show’s producers that they would not have anyone appear at the same time with any person opposing the initiative.
As the widespread public outrage over the non-prison sentence given to former Stanford student Brock, Turner illustrates, the public is not going to vote for a measure which releases sex offenders early from prison, along with thousands of inmates convicted of violent crime. That is why the Governor’s office has orchestrated a deliberate, calculated, and utterly misleading campaign for his initiative. They simply want to buy the election through misleading ads.
The Governor’s attempt to confuse and mislead starts with the language of the initiative, which respected columnist Dan Walters correctly labeled “obtuse.” Written in a way that allowed the Governor and other supporters to lie and claim it only applied to “non-violent” offenders, it took the California District Attorneys Association (CDAA) to go line by line through the initiative and establish that the initiative freed early from prison those serving sentences for sex and other violent crimes.
As I explained in a recent blog, only when pressed by Walters did the Governor’s campaign admit his claims it was limited to “non-violent” offenders were false. The misleading language isn’t the only example of what many have labeled “extraordinary steps Brown has taken” to place his initiative on the ballot. It started with Brown hijacking an unrelated initiative at the last minute and amending it to add his prison release language.
When the CDAA won a Superior Court ruling that the initiative violated state law, Brown not only convinced the California Supreme Court to take his appeal but got the Supreme Court to take the unusual step of allowing Brown to continue to collect signatures while the appeal was pending. Cynics might suggest the Supreme Court move was made to curry favor with the Governor who holds their purse strings, and whom the Supreme Court has been begging for years to increase court funding.
When it appeared even these moves would be insufficient to allow the Governor to obtain the required signatures to place his initiative on the ballot, the Governor and a complicit legislature sprang into action. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, the legislature provided an extra $16.3 million in election spending to “help defray the costs of validating voter signatures on ballot initiatives.” As noted by Walters, “Brown signed a hastily drafted bill to give local election officials a wad of state money if they processed measures whose signatures were submitted by May 20.” With that piece of legislation buying him three more weeks, the Governor obtained the signatures needed to place the initiative on the ballot.
The Governor has spent millions to place his initiative on the ballot and will spend millions more to support the initiative going forward. However, there is one thing the Governor knows is kryptonite to his initiative and will lead to its defeat – the truth. He knows the voters will not support an initiative when they learn the truth; that it is not limited to “non-violent offenders” but instead allows early release of sex offenders and others who have committed violent offenses.
When he announced the initiative, Governor Brown said he would do “whatever it takes to get this done.” As outlined here and in my previous writings, he has followed through on that statement, truth and justice for crime victims be damned. His campaign’s refusal to appear and engage in discussion with me or other opponents of his initiative on a public affairs television program is just the latest chapter in that effort to avoid a candid conversation with the voters about a measure that Deputy District Attorney Eric Siddall correctly called a radically dangerous experiment with public safety.