Paid signature gatherers are operating inside homeless encampments in San Francisco to collect ballot petition signatures for California’s November 2026 propositions. Video evidence captured on the street shows signers being offered payment and instructed by gatherers to use other people’s names and addresses, and the operation was still running the next day at a different location. When something goes wrong at street level, who is actually responsible?

In this episode, we sit down with JJ Smith, the San Francisco videographer who filmed the operation firsthand; James A. Kus, Fresno County clerk and registrar of voters; and Susan Shelley, editorial writer at the Southern California News Group, to examine how the legal market for paid signature gathering creates the economic conditions for this kind of fraud. They break down the per-signature price spike driven by the November ballot deadline and why the subcontractor chain behind commercial signature gathering makes accountability difficult to trace.

*Views expressed in this video are the opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

A large share of police calls in Los Angeles can be traced back to homelessness, at a time when departments are already short on officers. Behind each call is a mix of mental health crises, addiction, and conditions that rarely change after a single intervention. Why do so many people return to the same situation, even after contact with outside services?

In this episode, LAPD Commander Blake Chow talks about his decades of experience on the ground and what he learned about why these situations persist and what begins to shift when the response moves beyond isolated fixes.

*Views expressed in this video are the opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.

California’s water, land, and fire systems are, in many cases, driven by federal court orders from litigation decided decades ago, before current conditions existed. That distance between today’s challenges and the decisions governing them may explain more about California’s long-term planning struggles than most coverage admits.

In this episode, Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary of Natural Resources, sits down to discuss what the state is doing to change that, its conservation plan, its water infrastructure, and the conditions behind the Los Angeles fires.

*Views expressed in this video are the opinions of the host and guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of California Insider.