UC Irvine Researchers: Sanctuary State Policies Have No Impact on Crime in California

“Senate Bill 54, which made California a sanctuary state beginning Jan. 1, 2018, has been blamed for rising crime, yet no research has evaluated this claim,” 

A University of California at Irvine professor and one of her research assistants (a grad student)  has just come out with a "blockbuster" study that (according to them) shows that Senate Bill 54, which ushered in California's sanctuary state policy, has had no impact on crime in the state.

"Co-authors Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society, and Bradley Bartos, a doctoral candidate in criminology, law and society, compared California’s 2018 violent and property crime rates to an approximation of the state’s rates had SB 54 not been enacted."

Approximation?

https://news.uci.edu/2020/03/05/no-increase-in-crime-under-californias-sanctuary-state-status-uci-study-finds/

Methodology?

"Researchers who study the outcomes of public policy have difficulty linking particular policies to specific outcomes with confidence because there’s no way to evaluate what would have happened if the policy had not been implemented. To overcome this hurdle, Kubrin and Bartos constructed a “synthetic California” to represent the state as if SB 54 had not gone into effect. They surveyed nationwide data from 1970 to 2017 to find a combination of states that had crime trends closely matching California’s – but that did not experience a policy change – to serve as the control group for comparing crime rates with and without SB 54."

First of all, I don't do this kind of stuff for a living, and this is certainly no peer review, but being a simple guy, I don't buy much into these artificially created factors. Let's just say that's a little too much extrapolation for me-not to mention a rather short study span. Of course, we all know that people can take stats and make them say whatever they want them to say, and California does that more than a lot. So I have no competing statistics to offer, but we have a lot of anecdotal stories to tell, don't we? How about Kate Steinle, who was shot to death  by a just-released illegal alien in San Francisco in 2015? How about Jamiel Shaw, who was murdered by a just-released illegal alien gang member in Los Angeles in 2008?  And don't remind me that these two murders occurred before January 1, 2018. It's irrelevant. These problems have been going on for a long time, and the deaths of Steinle and Shaw were directly related to the refusal of local police to notify ICE of the release of a criminal illegal alien.

This is not to suggest that immigrants in general have higher crime rates than native-born Americans. But you can't tell me that protecting illegal aliens who are in the state criminal justice system from ICE and deportation doesn't have an adverse effect on crime. How does putting them back on the streets instead of a bus out of the country not make crime worse?

But then again, you didn't think a university would come out with a study showing that getting illegal alien criminals out of the country would decrease crime, did you?