California’s Democrat leaders should be embarrassed with vote on minor sex trafficking | Opinion

Even by the standards of California’s ultra-liberal Assembly, the initial denial of a bill to make sex trafficking of minors a serious felony was an embarrassment.

So much so that the committee that reached that first decision met again Thursday, reconsidered and this time passed the proposed bill onto the next committee. So the bill stays alive. Score one for common sense and decency.

Democrats in Sacramento sometimes tie themselves into knots over philosophy vs. reality, and the debate over Senate Bill 14 is one of those times.

Even the San Francisco Chronicle saw the Assembly Public Safety Committee’s first denial as ridiculous. “The notion that it isn’t a serious crime to traffic children for sex or labor is so absurd as to be laughable if it weren’t for the gravity of the situation,” wrote columnist Emily Hoeven.

Stiffer penalty for sex trafficking

In a quirk of the law, sex trafficking of minors has not been a felony that can qualify for the three-strikes law. To fix that omission, state Sen. Shannon Grove of Bakersfield, a Republican who also represents Clovis and eastern Fresno County, authored SB 14. Co-sponsoring it are Democrat Sens. Anna Caballero of Merced and Susan Rubio of East Los Angeles.

The measure passed the Senate and then moved to the Assembly. Grove expected it would pass there easily as well. But it ran into trouble with some progressive Democrats.

Associated Press reporter Adam Bean characterized the opposition. “Longer sentences don’t actually stop things from happening,” Assembly Majority Leader Isaac Bryan, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said at Tuesday’s hearing. “All they do is increase our investment in systems of harm and subjugation at the expense of the investments that the communities need to not have this be a problem to begin with.”

There is the philosophical argument: That Black and Hispanic people have for too long been incarcerated at too-high rates that any new sentencing laws just cannot be considered.

There is lots of data to support that view. And there is no bigger advocate for reducing prison populations than Gov. Gavin Newsom — he has been closing California prisons for several years. But even he could not stomach what the Public Safety Committee did.

“I want to understand exactly what happened yesterday (in the committee),” Newsom said, according to AP. “I take it very seriously.”

New Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas told the Sacramento Press Club on Wednesday that he was ““very engaged in this issue since I learned about it last night.”

Apparently pressure from Rivas and Newsom got the Public Safety Committee members to take the unusual step of rehearing the bill. Even so, in the tally Thursday, committee member Mia Bonta, a Democrat from Oakland, could not bring herself to vote for the measure. She abstained. Her husband? California Attorney General Rob Bonta.

Time for three strikes

SB 14 puts trafficking of minors under California’s Three Strikes Law, making it equal to crimes like murder, arson, rape and carjacking. Let’s go out on a limb and assume a majority of Californians would agree with such tougher sentencing.

Lest anyone think it is rare for young people to be trafficked for sex, the sad reality is that it is quite common. The Fresno Bee’s series in 2017, “Slaves of the Sex Trade,” reported how authorities have discovered trafficking victims at every high school in Fresno County, and most middle schools.

Trafficking is statewide problem. Sacramento State’s Institute for Social Research last year found that 13,000 people were victims of sex trafficking in Sacramento County from 2015 to 2020 — more than 11 times the number identified by law enforcement and service providers.

The Public Policy Institute of California notes that sex trafficking makes up most of the human trafficking cases in the state, and that the overwhelming majority of victims identify as female.

Most victims of human trafficking in the Central Valley have been sold for sex, according to a data tracking project by Fresno Pacific University’s Center for Community Transformation.

According to Saved In America, a San Diego-based group that helps locate runaways and missing children, a pimp can earn nearly $400,000 a year. Nationally, sex trafficking is the second-largest underground industry, only behind drug trafficking. Sex trafficking generates an estimated $99 billion in revenues a year.

With all due respect to Assemblymember Bryan, supporting SB 14 is a no-brainer. Assembly Democrats should not get lost in the weeds of their crime-and-justice philosophy on this one. When it come back to the Appropriations Committee in several weeks, SB 14 should get quickly passed and sent forward.

As The Bee wrote in May in backing the bill: “The Legislature should speed SB 14 through the committees and vote in support to give law enforcement a new tool for arresting, convicting and imprisoning anyone who would wreck a young person’s life out of greed.”