William Bennett, 31, was sleeping on a beachfront walkway when a cop woke him up. The longtime addict was on probation, so he had to let police search him. A speck of heroin was tucked in his wallet.

Two years ago, Bennett would have faced handcuffs, a felony and possibly a few years behind bars. But on this November night in Ventura, a Southern California beach town, police wrote him a ticket and let him go. They could have hauled him to jail instead, but he most likely would have been released by morning, back on the street and looking to refill his wallet.

“If it’s a drug charge, I usually get out pretty quick,” Bennett said, calmly, as cops scribbled out his latest citation for misdemeanor drug possession. “I’m still going to do what I’m going to do. Lock me up, throw away the key. I’m always going to be a user.”

Drug busts like this one have been dramatically deprioritized by police since voters passed Proposition 47, which reduced the possession of hard drugs from a felony to a misdemeanor. Statewide, police made about 22,000 fewer drug arrests in 2015, a 9.5 percent decrease in the first full year under the new law. The sharp drop in drug arrests is the most significant impact Prop 47 has had on California crime, according to an analysis of decades of crime data by USA TODAY Network-California journalists.

Cops can still jail anyone caught with meth, heroin or cocaine, but because many counties don’t have enough jail space to hold misdemeanor suspects, addicts are often released later that same day, neither punished nor rehabilitated. Police can also forgo jail in favor of a misdemeanor citation, which orders a suspect to report to court to face charges at a later date, but citations have no immediate consequences, and misdemeanor charges aren’t serious enough to pressure addicts into drug court.

Caught between ineffective jail bookings and toothless citations, cops are increasingly doing neither.

“Police aren’t going to spend their scarce time on what they believe to be a fruitless activity,” said Jim Bueermann, a former Redlands police chief who leads The Police Foundation, a Washington, D.C. think tank. He likened the trend to his time as a narcotics investigator, when the gradual decriminalization of marijuana led cops to pour out bags of pot instead of bothering with a pointless arrest. “I bet there is a lot of methamphetamine being poured out on the streets of California now.”

Nowhere was the re-prioritization clearer than in the city of Fresno, where drug busts dropped by nearly half as officers were assigned to a new mission.

Fresno Police Department Chief Jerry Dyer said his agency pivoted away from a historical focus on street-level busts to instead concentrate on the street gangs that supply drugs in the first place. The manpower that once prowled the streets for addicts started listening to wiretaps instead.

It was a good trade, Dyer said. This year, the strengthened anti-gang unit has arrested at least 45 people – including the leaders of three gangs – and seized about 50 guns and more than 80 pounds of meth.

“I’m not saying what we used to do with drugs wasn’t effective – it was – but after Prop 47 happened, we had to modify our approach,” Dyer said. “We used a scalpel versus a shotgun effect, and that scalpel allowed us to carve those gang leaders out of our community.”

Drug arrests fell in more than two-thirds of all California counties in 2015, including in the trafficking hubs of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino County, where busts decreased by 24, 26 and 15 percent, respectively. In counties like Ventura, overall arrests increased but police shifted towards writing more citations and taking fewer addicts to jail. The most extreme exception was in Shasta County, where drug arrests increased by 44 percent even as police leaders acknowledged they needed a new strategy.

“We’re not going to arrest our way out of the problem anymore,” said Robert Paoletti, chief of police in Redding, the largest city in Shasta County. “We have to look at and support other ways of trying to deal with the root cause and to me that’s bringing in drug treatment.”

Prop 47, which was passed by voters in 2014, freed at least 13,500 jail and prison inmates who were serving sentences for drug and property crimes. However, the initiative has not yet introduced any new services to help these former inmates combat addiction or mental illness – underlying causes of low-level crime. Millions of dollars that no longer had to be spent in prisons were earmarked for rehabilitation, but two years after inmates were released, the process of divvying this money between counties has only just begun.

Prop 47 also raised the threshold for petty theft from $500 to $950. Law enforcement officials say thousands of addicts who were dumped on the streets are now stealing to support their habits – and they can’t get in much trouble for that either.

“What's happening with the offender is nothing,” said Stephen Johnson, chief of the eastern patrol division of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “They're not being punished. They're not getting treatment. The net result is victimization for our local communities who see a rise in crime.”

Johnson, who has spent nearly four decades as an LA-area cop, recently led a department study on Prop 47, producing some of the first front-line data about how the law has impacted crime. The department tracked about 53,000 people after they were arrested for Prop 47 crimes, revealing that they were being re-arrested at a normal rate, and that 92 percent of their charges were for additional drug possession or property crimes. In Los Angeles County, thousands of Prop 47 offenders appeared to be stuck in a cycle of drug use and theft, but few were graduating to violent crime.

Deep in this cycle is Daniel Harris, a skinny, bespectacled meth addict who lives on the streets of Industry, a Los Angeles suburb with one of the highest rates of property crime in the nation.

“I haven’t really committed any felonies – don’t plan on it,” Harris said.

“They’re not felonies anymore,” Arcos responded, annoyed.

"No matter how many times I do it?" Harris asked, with a mocking laugh. “Just kidding."

Thefts like Harris’ – too big to be ignored, too small for jail – are partly why property crime has climbed since Prop 47 took effect, according to California Department of Justice data.

Statewide, property crime climbed 8 percent from 2014 to 2015. Theft of at least $400, a crime category in which most penalties were reduced by Prop 47, rose by 10 percent to the highest point in a decade, though some of the change is the result of reclassifying crimes. The single largest contributor to rising property crime was a 12 percent increase in car theft, which has no direct link to Prop 47 reforms.

The crime bump in 2015 is not that significant when looking at long-term trends. California’s property crime rate hit an all-time high in 1980 and then plummeted for the next two decades. It has continued to drop ever since, reaching its lowest point in at least 55 years in 2014. The reported property crime total in 2015 was still among the lowest in the last half century, despite Prop 47.

When confronted with these numbers, law enforcement officials often say they are more concerned with the direction, not the magnitude, of change.

Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin, one of many DAs who opposed the initiative, sees 2015 as a first step in the wrong direction.

Prop 47 is releasing many of the drug offenders who were locked up by strict sentencing laws in the ‘90s, which Hestrin credits for reducing crime statewide. But since the public has had decades to forget about the pain of crime, “everybody started worrying about the poor inmate” instead.

“So we reverse, and start opening the jails and prisons and the crime rate goes back up,” Hestrin said. “That’s the real fear.”

But even if crime does rise, public policy experts insist Prop 47 is progress, not a setback.

Elliott Currie, a criminologist at University of California, Irvine who specializes in drug policy, said prison has proven to be an unjust and ineffective punishment for addicts, who make little progress when incarcerated. The addicts who are stealing today weren’t rehabilitated when they were locked up before. Putting them back wouldn’t be any different, Currie said.

“My goodness, if we have an uptick in property crime, that doesn’t mean put folks back in prison,” Currie said. “We know the older system didn’t work, and we can’t go back to that. The question is, what does the alternative look like?”

That question surfaces daily on the streets of California as cops confront the same addicts over and over.

Last month in Oxnard, two officers caught Jose Barragan, a chronic offender, sleeping in an electrical closet behind an apartment complex near a children’s playground. In Barragan’s pockets, police found two blackened glass pipes and what appeared to be a baggie of meth.

The encounter was nothing new. Homeless people are found in the electrical closet regularly, said Officer Jacob Jundef, so he wanted to show the residents he was at least trying to help. He handcuffed Barragan and hauled him to jail, all too aware that he wouldn’t be held for long.

Barragan was released six hours later.

"We're at least trying to solve the problem for now," Jundef said. “Does it really help? Who knows.”

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