Newsom Shocks California Politics by Scrapping Crime Measure

California Governor Gavin Newsom abruptly abandoned a carefully negotiated ballot measure designed to tackle property crime and the fentanyl crisis, stunning the state’s political establishment a day after his office trumpeted the proposal.

The last-minute reversal dashed Newsom’s effort to forge a compromise among Democratic factions in the legislature, where his party has a supermajority, to revamp Proposition 47. The decade-old law reclassified some nonviolent drug and property crimes as misdemeanors rather than felonies, and has drawn fire from critics who say it has exacerbated drug abuse and retail theft.