No, I mean I see it with my own eyes when I walk/drive the same streets of California I have my entire life. When I was a kid, I would go to the skatepark at 10 years old and be there all day and basically have zero parent supervision and it was 'safe'. There was only one homeless person who was basically an older guy who pushed around a TV and plugged it in at various public outlets. Now, I go to the same public places and they are literally infested with fentanyl zombies who are stripping the copper wire out of the street lights... I see prostitutes walking the streets in public half naked in LA. If you have lived in SF, LA, Sacramento, or any of the other major metro areas--you can see it with your own eyes. It simply wasn't like this when I was a teenager in the early 2000s.
>Fomenting fear of a crime epidemic is an intentional and well-funded political objective.
Sure, but I just want to be able to walk in public and feel safe. That has all rapidly changed since Prop 47 passed in 2014. The entire west coast of America is in rapid decline and it's incredibly apparent--just look at any underpass or freeway offramp. Go to east Oakland and check out the Mad Max style homeless camps--it's not something that was there in 2001. I had a bullet come through my bathroom wall in SF and SFPD threw it in a sandwich baggie and never called me or did any investigation. I had multiple trespassers at my apartment building but SFPD never did anything until I finally got a restraining order... but they'd only remove them and then they'd come right back. When my grandpa died a few years ago, within a few days squatters somehow found out and moved in. Things are pretty objectively worse than they were 20 years ago. And all the stats are juked and tweaked because cops won't arrest, juries won't convict, and judges won't sentence criminals in California. The statistics are just fake at that point.
I blame it on the rise of fentanyl and meth. Drugs are cheaper than ever and more widely available due to decriminalization.