Sacramento Sheriff's Office slams lawmakers for soft on crime

SACRAMENTO — A wild highway chase with suspects filming the whole thing live on Instagram has the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office calling out soft-on-crime laws for letting the teens walk free after another recent arrest.

Dispatch audio describes the chase that reached speeds of 100 miles per hour Tuesday.

Audio from the dispatch: “…they have phones out the window recording the chase…”

Dispatch Audio: “…your suspects are live on Instagram, with a gun in the car…”

“They were live on Instagram while they engaged in this pursuit,” said sheriff’s spokesman Sgt. Amar Gandhi said. “So that's how seriously they didn't take it. To them, it was just a real-life video game.”

Gandhi said the two suspects arrested in the case were 16-year-old confirmed gang members and that three firearms were also found in the vehicle. He said one of the teens had been arrested following a pursuit a few months earlier.

“So if you have any legislators working for you right now, who aren't taking this seriously, who don't really care about putting these guys in jail, call them, talk to them,” Gandhi said. “You'd be amazed at what's happening in this building right now. We continue to talk about criminal justice reform, maybe trying to shift that conversation to public safety reform.”

“I would say right now the pendulum is a little bit to the left,” said Sacramento-based attorney Kevin Adamson. “I definitely saw him swing.”

Adamson has been handling juvenile court cases for 25 years and said that while he now sees more leniency in the justice system toward juveniles, teens arrested with guns are not being released quickly.

“So the idea of ​​a kid going on a high-speed chase, having guns in the car, getting out a few days later, that's not something – I been doing this for a long time, I have a “I have a ton of experience doing this – it just doesn’t happen,” Adamson said.

Adamson said that in California, there is mandatory detention for any minor found in possession of a firearm.

In Sacramento County, youth detention trends have changed dramatically over the past two decades, according to the California Attorney General's Office.

In 2002, the average daily population of young people in juvenile facilities was 500. This figure fell to 93 in 2020. It increased to 176 in 2023.

Anderson attributed the shift to an overall decrease in crime and an effort to rehabilitate juveniles instead of punishing them.

“It’s much more difficult to get a child into adult court today than it was two or three years ago,” Adamson said.

“They don't care. They're having fun. They're doing what they're doing. They're not afraid of getting caught,” Gandhi said.

These teens also crashed into several vehicles on the highway before their own accident. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured.

Like adults, it will be up to the prosecutor's office to determine what crimes to charge them with.