There are reports flying around that the city of Sacramento, CA, is paying gangs not to kill people. However, the left-leaning fact-check site Snopes is claiming that these reports are “Mostly False.” Who is correct?
On August 29, FOX40 reported that the Sacramento City Council approved of providing $1.5 million in funding to a program called “Advance Peace” that provides an 18-month fellowship program to gang members through which they can earn monthly stipends through various benchmarks as encouragement to change their violent behavior.
The program claims that it’s successful, citing how the use of its concept in the city of Richmond since 2009 has resulted in a decline in crime, although The Sacramento Bee’s Associate Editor Foon Rhee pointed out the following:
Richmond’s murder and violent crimes rates did drop, though there was also an uptick in 2015, as in many other California cities. A 2015 study called it a “strong contributing factor” in the violent crime drop, along with policing, the improving economy and an overall decline in crime.
Richmond also has an absurdly high rate of murders that go unsolved.
So what did Snopes take issue with? They were irked at the reporting that the $1.5 million was coming out of a general fund. The money was coming out of the city’s Gang Prevention and Intervention Task Force budget and is going toward “hiring staff, coordinating the rollout of the program, setting up a process for program evaluation and other infrastructure needs,” rather than directly to the stipend money.
Even so, that’s still taxpayer money being used toward a program that pays gang members not to kill people. But Snopes even tries to claim that the merit-based nature of the stipends means that they’re not necessarily paying gang members not kill others.
And yet, Devone Boggan, the founder of Advance Peace, basically admitted that the program is doing just that (H/T: CNN):
He bristles when asked whether it’s a good idea to use tax dollars to pay people to stop committing violence. “That’s nothing compared to the cost of gun violence in this city,” Boggan says.
So, sorry Snopes, Sacramento did agree to essentially pay gang members to not be violent.
Instead of that kind of policy, Sacramento would do much better using its prior program of threatening gang members with arrest if they didn’t reform themselves and highlighting how California Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) soft-on-crime initiatives have made it harder to crack down on criminals in the state.