Here’s a great message from the Newport Mesa Tea Party:
Yet another Assault on our Liberty by Reckless Government Bureaucrats
Stand up for Family Rights and Privacy against misguided social engineering
COME TELL THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS TO STOP THE SHO!
Tuesday, December 17th
9:30 a.m.
Board Chambers in the Hall of Administration
333 W. Santa Ana Blvd., 10 Civic Center Plaza, 1st Floor,
(corner of Broadway and Santa Ana Blvd.)
Santa Ana, CA 92701.
For further information, please contact the Clerk of the Board of Supervisors at (714) 834-2206.
SOCIAL HOST ORDINANCE BACKGROUND
JUST SAY NO TO THE SOCIAL HOST ORDINANCE
- CA Penal Code 272 provides a state wide enforcement standard preventing adults from specific acts facilitating teen drinking, and promotes uniform enforcement, prevents selective enforcement under arbitrary, unpredictable and uneven local police practices. Local autonomy from state and federal power is important, but citizens also need to guard against violation of rights by local government authorities.
- Under guise of “giving local police one more tool to keep kids safe,” the SHO gives local elected as well as appointed city officials and police excessive discretion to criminalize what police subjectively determine adults present “should have known,” no specific act or even a specific omission required. SHO is a threat to procedural and substantive due process rights.
- City and county may incur liability for botched arrests if a SHO enacted as a political grandstanding stunt leads to abuse of overly broad definition of crime and unreasonable discretion in violation of due process.
- Alcohol-only SHO increases consequences for adults who fail to stop teen drinking in private homes. At same time SHO reduces in relative terms enforcement threat for adults who allow partying with other illegal substances. This implies political tolerance for adults who enable partying with marijuana, prescription drugs and hallucinatory drugs. For these very reasons the MADD national website model SHO is not alcohol only, but rather applies to alcohol and all controlled substances. [http://www.madd.org/underage-drinking/the-power-of-parents/high-school-parents/social-host/Model_Social_Host_Ordinance_Cities.pdf]
(714) 834-2206
THE SOCIAL HOST ORDINANCE CAMPAIGN IS POLITICAL THEATER
THAT WILL HAVE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
- For more than two years there has been a concerted campaign to promote the SHO in Orange County at the local School Board and City Council level, based on demonstrably false legal and social policy predicates.
- After adoption of politically sensational but legally flawed SHO ordinances in some OC cities, it has been rejected by other OC towns where local leaders became educated before acting impulsively.
- Favorable first impression about keeping teens safe makes SHO politically appealing to opportunistic politicians, but there is no evidence of actual deterrence or statistics on teen drinking and partying related to criminal incidents requiring a disproportionate enforcement policy for teen drinking:
Alcohol partying is easier for parents, police and community to detect and address. The Social Host Ordinance will drive teen drinking underground and out of homes into their cars, on the road out of town, and/or to remote even more unsupervised locations. Highly functional families with parenting skills to deal with teen drinking will be forced to shut the door on kids from less functional families who are more at risk because singles parents are absent or parents lack effective skills, degrading positive socialization and community response to teen drinking.
- The highly politicized campaign to impose the SHO county-wide is culminating in the SHO being pushed by Supervisor Todd Spitzer. Spitzer’s advocacy of an alcohol-only SHO is not sustained by sound law enforcement values or the true meaning of the DUI victimology he evokes.