Jerry Dyer is frustrated… The Fresno police are having to re-arrest armed felons over and over again. In fact this makes him so angry that he wants to use the force of government to create new laws in order to make it harder to obtain bonds and keep them in jail.
Dyer told his command staff that it is
Barry Pearlstein, owner of Lucky Bail Bonds, said he will ask the chief to include bail bondsmen in the discussion. He noted that by law, bail cannot be set “in a punitive manner.”
“If a person should not be on the street, lawmakers should make laws accordingly, I think the chief is missing the point.”
Dyer has met with the district attorney and local judges in effort to keep offenders with a history of gang affiliations in jail for an extended period of time. Barry Pearlstein hopes that in the future bondsmen will be included in the conversation. Keep in mind that raising the price for freedom or giving inmates no bail status will only lead to over crowding. If Dyer is really concerned about these violent offender, releasing them will no bail conditions should be looked at as a step backwards.
I’ve met, conversed and had friends who were in gangs throughout my life. In fact a close friend of my family was killed in a drive by. He wasnt a gang member but was hanging out with one local gang sets in Salinas, CA. He was killed by a bullet intended for someone in the clique he was hanging out with. Although a tragedy even this violent act wasn’t supposed to harm civilians.
Most of the people I’ve known who are/were gang members weren’t into random acts of violence and hold no ill will against the community in general. Their main focus is protecting their business endeavors. Smart and established members of the organized crime community, have realized violence only endangers their operations and the risk factor is elevated while the reward factor is significantly diminished.
Violence is bad for business on both ends. When the police are involved in shootouts or feel that certain areas are hot zones for violence it can make some officers no longer want to respond to calls in those areas out of concern for their safety. Still others may treat those areas as free fire zones only escalating the violence and eroding the communities trust in their ability to objectively judge situations and react accordingly. When a gang member attacks someone from a rival gang or a civilian, the police begin investigation and investigations are often detrimental to their operation, as well as, their freedom. Violence also increases tensions with rivals, which can lead to more bloodshed, as well as, problems with business associates who won’t work with them due to the added heat from law enforcement or fear of retaliation from rivals.
Murders are for the most part bi-products of prohibition or interpersonal disputes. Granted every now and then someone does something outrageous and shoots up a school but these incidents are few and far between and occasionally staged. When someone gets victimized in a market that exists solely because of government prohibition or other victimless interactions where “legitimate” recourse is not provided by the state, the only options left are to let it go and potentially go out of business, or take matters into their own hands and do whatever they can to retain their property and get justice.
An easy solution to reducing this type of violence in our communities is to remove the criminalization of self ownership. If we truly are the sole proprietors of our bodies, should we not be allowed to choose what we put in their bodies? After all if laws actually reduced crime, America would be crime free. We add 40,000 laws every year and have reached a point where there are so many laws it has become impossible to count how many we actually have. In fact, the average person will commit 3 felonies a day without even realizing it. Most drug sales or pleasure agreements are voluntary interactions consensually entered into by both parties these contracts are purely self serving and there is no ill will or malice and there definitely is not a victim.
