Why Gunowners in “Free States” need to pay attention to their elections.

[LRRPF52]

CA has more conservatives than all the surrounding States combined, but their votes don't count because corrupt city councils, State legislature, and the big city organized crime rings have Gerrymadered all the districts so that conservative constitutionalist are marginalized, while the State continues to indoctrinate the future generations into socialist servitude, via the current generation of teachers who were taught the same hate-America agenda in the last generation.

Organized crime rings solidified their takeover of the major cities back in the 1920s and 1930s during prohibition, on a backdrop of corruption dating back to 1850. Los Angeles started as small town with around 1300 inhabitants in the wake of the Gold Rush. Farmers and shopkeepers looking to make an honest living were preyed upon by "...gamblers, disillusioned miners from the Sierra foothills, saloonkeepers, horse thieves, and renegades."

LAPD's own website even includes the admission that the department was filled with scandal back then, but shows nowhere on the timeline where the department was cleaned up between then and now. Politicians, Sheriffs, city councilmen, school board administrators, newspapermen, etc. were all bought off as the money flowed in from alcohol, prostitution, narcotics, extortion, and racketeering profits. Several chiefs tried to clean up the corruption, but their efforts were always short-lived.

Starting in 1920 and for the better part of the next 20 years, varying levels of corruption tainted local government and the Department. This was the era of prohibition and the Depression. Known as a wide-open town, Los Angeles attracted the worst elements produced by the times. Crooked politicians, racketeers, bootleggers, and judges enjoyed immunity to arrest. The City was all but totally in the hands of bosses who controlled elected officials, dictating police appointments and promotions while garnering huge sums from booze, gambling, and vice. During one 15-month period, more than 100 of the Department’s 1,200 officers were dismissed on one or another charge of misconduct. Accompanying these conditions were widespread labor unrest and protests from revolutionary activists.

This is not to imply that progress had been stalled in the Police Department. A merit system was implemented in 1920, followed in 1922 by salary increases and the appointment of the first Deputy Chief and Inspector of Detectives. The City’s population by now neared one million and its territory had expanded to 363 square miles.

Source: LAPD Online Department History: 1900-1925

One of the LAPD Chiefs, James E. Davis, decided to declare war against rum-smugglers and gun-toters, calling for them to be brought in dead.

In addition to stressing marksmanship, Davis sought successfully to make LAPD officers known worldwide as firearm experts. He initiated the dragnet system for tracking down wanted criminals, stressed the value of statistics for determining crime trends, and fired more than 240 officers for "bad conduct."

Davis' successor, Chief Roy E. Steckel, implemented the Department's first air patrol in 1931, assigning 10 officers to a fixed wing squadron. But public confidence in the Department left much to be desired. In an effort to restore trust, Mayor John C. Porter (1929-1933) hired a former LAPD detective to maintain surveillance over the Department, assisted by private investigators who soon acquired the name of "super snoopers." They were equipped with police Captain badges and ordered to spy on the high City officials. They functioned for three years before the City Council dispensed with their services.

Meanwhile in San Francisco ( a wide open town), the Mayor "Sunny Jim" Rolph owned his own whorehouse. He later became the Governor of CA, known as "Governor Lynch" for promising to pardon any of the vigilantes who had lynched a pack of kidnapper/murderers.

CA major cities at the time were hotbeds of vigilantism, racial discrimination, riots, murders, corrupt police and city councils, mayors, mini-wars between labor and business, and downright lawlessness in many regards. As the population increased and 2 major World Wars galvanized the Nation, the room for the politically-corrupt got much more comfortable, hidden among one of the largest economies in the world.

Police work was allowed to focus on street criminals, as long as it didn't interfere with corrupt city and State officials and their networks of underworld financiers.

Nanci Pelosi, for example, is the daughter of mafia Mayor of Boston and Massachusetts Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. There are real names you can place on these vampiric vermin who make life hard for law-abiding people who just want to live the American dream and enjoy their freedom.

California's sordid history of Wild West violence, criminal syndicates taking over municipal and State government, and the balance of abuse of power and citizen unrest is a very interesting journey if you're ever inclined to study it. The relevance to CA dwellers who pay attention to elections is that you are presented with candidates who have been financed by the corrupt system, no matter what party they run under. Organized crime control over the joke 2-party system has dominated CA elections for generations.