By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

Today, Roseville Police released an alert about a bear sighting in Roseville, in a residential area near Foothills Blvd between Blue Oaks Blvd and Pleasant Grove.

The sighting in Roseville follows multiple bear sightings in Rocklin yesterday. 

Bear sightings in South Placer County follow numerous reports of bears showing up in residential areas at higher elevations and are a natural development in light of the state’s growing population of black bears.

Sacramento’s political majority has eschewed black-bear population control policies under the banner of coexistence between bear and man. Under this approach, the population has grown from an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 bears in 1982 to between 49,000 and 71,000 today.

Now the bears are showing up in Roseville and Rocklin neighborhoods.

Reflecting the state’s humane policy, officials said they were not trying to capture the Roseville bear because they expect it to leave town on its own. Residents are advised to keep their distance, secure their garbage and food, supervise their pets, and call 911 if the bear becomes aggressive.

A series of political developments have favored bears in recent years. In 2012, California banned bear hunting with dogs. The ban caused the bear harvest to drop by nearly 50 percent. The state has not met its bear-hunting quota since. California Fish and Wildlife now acknowledges that it receives thousands of reports each year involving bears in urban, rural, and mountain communities, including property damage and other conflicts.

An incident in Altadena earlier this year illustrates the fact that in 2026 California, life is good when you are a bear. There, a 550-pound bear moved into a homeowner’s crawl space and remained there for weeks. It damaged a gas line, forcing the homeowner to shut off his gas. California wildlife officials repeatedly failed to effectively intervene as their humane attempts at rousting the bear repeatedly failed to produce results. Eventually they caught a bear. But it was the wrong bear.

The homeowner was left dealing with the original bear, the property damage, and the state’s refusal to treat the situation with the seriousness it deserved.

This is not responsible wildlife management. It is a political system that protects the animal and transfers the cost to the citizen.

And it may be about to get even worse.

As the impacts of the state’s failure to effectively manage the black bears already entering California communities become more and more apparent, legislative Democrats are now laying the groundwork for the reintroduction of the grizzly bear, a much larger and more dangerous predator than the black bear.

The grizzly proposal is not some unrelated environmental project. It reveals the larger insanity. Sacramento Democrats are asking Californians to accept a growing black-bear population, repeated neighborhood encounters, property damage, and weak responses from wildlife officials—while simultaneously considering the return of a far larger and more dangerous predator.

None of this is inevitable.

California could use stronger population controls. It could remove repeat-offender bears. It could treat a bear living under a house as a public-safety and property-rights problem instead of a public-relations inconvenience.

Instead, Democrats reduced hunting tools, allowed the population to grow, and now expect residents to accommodate the consequences.

And Roseville residents are being told to live with it because Democrats would rather protect their ideology than protect the people who have to pay for it.