Big cities throughout California continue to be roiled by police issues. Oakland and San Francisco have gotten the most attention because of high-profile

But the two iconic Bay Area cities are hardly alone in having police problems.

In Sacramento, last month’s release of a video showing officers’ July 11 killing of Joseph Mann, a mentally ill African American who was carrying a knife, has shaken public faith in the Police Department. The agency refused to provide the video or to offer key details about the incident until forced to by the Sacramento Bee’s release of a surveillance video on Sept. 20. It was revealed that before officers shot Mann 14 times, they tried to run him over, though he appeared no immediate threat to anyone.

A casualty of the controversy may be the Sacramento Community Police Commission, which formed last year partly in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Last week, the chairman of the commission — Sacramento pastor Les Simmons — abruptly resigned. At a press conference, he said the commission’s lack of authority to subpoena witnesses and conduct independent investigations left him feeling he was “not being relevant and true to my community.” The panel is essentially a city advisory body.

Days before the Bee released the video, Sacramento Police Chief Sam Somers Jr. announced he was retiring in December, when new Mayor Darrell Steinberg takes office. Somers insisted his decision was unrelated to his officers’ fatal shooting of Mann. But the Sacramento Bee reported that Somers wasn’t comfortable with the new era in which police are routinely called on to defend and justify their actions.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Commission — which has the level of authority that Simmons wants in Sacramento — has broken with Police Chief Charlie Beck over two police killings in 2015. On Sept. 20, a near-unanimous board ruled that both cases violated LAPD’s use-of-force guidelines. In one case, James Joseph Byrd — a 45-year-old white man with a history of mental illness — was shot to death after throwing a beer bottle that hit a police car. In the other, Norma Guzman — a 37-year-old Latina with a history of mental illness — was shot to death while brandishing a knife and approaching officers.

Beck offered a particularly vigorous defense of his officers’ handling of the Guzman case. But commissioners — and members of the public — repeatedly questioned why officers didn’t use a Taser to subdue the woman.

L.A. officers must ‘choose your life or your job’

This drew a fierce counterattack from the LAPD union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, on its website:

Run away. If a police officer is confronted by a suspect with a weapon, those entrusted to set policies for the Police Department believe officers should run away. That’s the recent finding from the Los Angeles Police Commission which has turned Monday morning quarterbacking into a weekly agenda item at the three-ring circus they preside over every Tuesday morning. …

The Commission is becoming nothing more than a politically motivated rubber stamp for the warped worldview of a handful of activists that they pander to. …

The message the Los Angeles Police Commission is sending to officers confronted with a violent and dangerous suspect is clear: You can save your life or save your job, but you cannot do both. You choose.

The Police Commission dismissed the union criticism and followed up last week by approving new policies meant to reduce civilian deaths and to promote transparency. The policies require significantly more information to be released about shootings involving officers; an increased emphasis on role-playing training using “real world” scenarios; and regular evaluations of how serious incidents that don’t end in tragedy are handled to develop a best-practices approach to scaling down confrontations with individuals.

Commissioner Steve Soboroff — the only member to side with Chief Beck and defend the fatal shootings of Boyd and Guzman — joined in the unanimous vote to force changes on the LAPD.

But now a Bay Area judge has issued a ruling rebuking the city of Hayward and its police department for this practice. The case stemmed from the National Lawyers Guild’s request for footage from officers’ body cameras as they helped patrol a contentious overnight Black Live Matters protest in Berkeley on Dec. 6-7, 2014 — a request police complied with after the guild paid $3,247. Police justified the high cost by saying the footage had to be carefully examined and redacted.

That led to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Northern California and the Law Offices of Amitai Schwartz that culminated recently with a terse decision by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evilio Grillo.

“The CPRA [California Public Records Act] and the related provisions in the California Constitution demonstrate a strong policy that the public should have prompt and low-cost access to public records,” Grillo wrote. Hayward and its police agency erred in its fee request by not only billing the guild for the direct costs associated with duplicating records but costs of “ancillary tasks necessarily associated with the retrieval, inspection and handling of the file from which the copy is extracted.”

Grillo’s ruling was called precedent-setting by the ACLU. It parallels a Milwaukee police case in which the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered the city police agency to stop charging for redaction in public records requests.

Grillo ordered the Hayward police department to refund all but $1 of the $3,247 bill, with the $1 covering the cost of the DVD onto which the body camera footage was copied.

In November, the National Lawyers Guild sued the city of Berkeley on behalf of 11 plaintiffs over the conduct of its police force and the neighboring agencies which helped respond to the large protest. The suit alleges indiscriminate use of tear gas, rubber bullets and batons against protesters who were responding to the clearing of a white New York police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who was caught on video telling police “I can’t breathe” before dying.

Berkeley police officials have already formally acknowledged doing a poor job during the protest. In June 2015, the department submitted a report to Berkeley’s Police Review Commission with 32 recommendations, “including improving the officers’ awareness of developing situations, making deployment of police resources more efficient and increasing the quality of equipment for communication with protesters,” the Daily Californian reported.

The affluent city has been roiled three times since December by cases where police fatally shot criminal suspects who didn’t appear to be an immediate threat to police or others nearby.

One consequence was the local Black Lives Matter branch pulling out of the signature event of the Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco over reports that police were going to have a higher presence because of post-Orlando massacre fears.

Black Lives Matter, which was to be an organizational grand marshal for the parade themed “For Racial and Economic Justice,” cited concerns over the San Francisco Police Department’s “recent track record of racist scandal and killings of people of color” and how first responders can be a source of harm to “queer communities of color.”

“The Black Lives Matter network is grateful to the people of San Francisco for choosing us, we choose you too,” said Malkia Cyril, a member of Black Lives Matter, in a press release. “As queer people of color, we are disproportionately targeted by both vigilante and police violence.”

That’s from an account in the Los Angeles Times.

Police union wary of S.F. reforms

This weekend flap came after the San Francisco Police Commission took an extraordinary step last week to impose formal limits on officers’ use of force. 

The amended policy calls for the use of “minimal” force in dealing with suspects, not “reasonable” force, which is the standard with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court. It also formally underscored the importance of officers using “de-escalation” techniques in incidents with members of the public that appear to have the potential for violence.

In negotiations with the ACLU, city leaders, the Public Defenders Office and other community groups, the San Francisco Police Officers Association strongly objected to the “minimal” force requirement. But the police union ended up agreeing not to oppose the change — for now.

The union has already emphasized it will never agree to a ban on the use of carotid restraint holds or to sharp new limits on shooting at moving vehicles.

This matters because collective bargaining laws still give the police union the chance to affect final policies.

Police may stop doing ‘anything but taking reports’

The fatal shooting of an unarmed criminal suspect in mid-May led to Police Chief Suhr’s forced resignation and his replacement on a temporary basis by one of his top aides, Deputy Chief Toney Chaplin.

San Francisco Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross, who have broken many key stories in police controversies in recent years, released a report that may make it difficult for SFPD to attract a high-profile replacement in a nationwide search.

Morale is so bad among officers convinced that they are being treated unfairly that it could soon affect everyday policing, Matier & Ross wrote.

“The fear is, they aren’t going to do anything but taking reports,” an unnamed San Francisco police union official told the columnists.

Since the protests in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 triggered sharp, sustained criticism of police behavior, crime has gone up in several U.S. cities. The cause or causes are a matter of much dispute. But a National Institute of Justice report this month said it was plausible to see the post-Ferguson criticism affecting how police did their jobs.

Current California law already bars the practice of seizing property without a conviction for assets valued at under $25,000 and requires “clear and convincing evidence” of a connection to a crime for assets exceeding $25,000 in value.

Law enforcement can get around that if the seizure is done in coordination with federal law enforcement and 20 percent of the proceeds are kicked up to the federal government — yet often there’s not even an arrest because federal law doesn’t require it. Instead there’s just a suspicion that the property, not necessarily the person, is attached to some criminal activity.

People often get their property back, but after considerable time and hassle. Or sometimes they don’t. So the bill, sponsored by Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, and Asm. David Hadley, R-Torrance, would close that loophole and require a conviction for seizure of assets of any amount. Proponents like Mitchell and others say the practice often violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

“Our country and our state’s constitutions aim to protect the citizenry and this is a classic example of that,” Mitchell told CalWatchdog in an interview. “If folks love to promote the right to bear arms, I say we have the right to our own private property not being seized by law enforcement, (especially) when not even being charged with a crime.”

How it works

The program was designed to seize the assets of large criminal enterprises, toppling them in the process. But as budgets were cut, law enforcement saw it as a viable revenue stream, and the claims of abuse started piling up.

Some of the more egregious examples have been the attempted seizure of a $1.5 million building in Anaheim because the landlord rented space to a medical marijuana dispensary (which was legal in CA), and the story of Bob Alexander, who had $10,788 in cash that he was about to use to purchase a car for his daughter before the money was seized in Mendocino County because he had medical marijuana on him (along with the doctor’s recommendation for the marijuana, which was shown to police).

Alexander did get his money back eight months later. No charges were ever filed.

Opponents of the bill argue that law enforcement doesn’t police for profit, and asset seizure is a vital tool used to cripple criminal organizations, partially by funding costly investigations. The California District Attorneys Association claimed the bill would “deny every law enforcement agency in California direct receipt of any forfeited assets.”

“California’s asset forfeiture law will be changed for the worse, and it will cripple the ability of law enforcement to forfeit assets from drug dealers when arrest and incarceration is an incomplete strategy for combatting drug trafficking,” Sean Hoffman, CDAA’s director of legislation argued in a letter.

“Narcotics investigations are costly, and the California asset forfeiture law’s dedication of forfeiture proceeds to the seizing law enforcement agencies speaks to the serious resource needs involved when drug traffickers and their ill-gotten gains are pursued,” Hoffman added.

Revenue from the equitable sharing program exploded over the last decade as local agencies in California became more aware of the loophole and budgets were threatened as part of the recession. From 2002 to 2013, revenue from federal forfeitures (the ones that don’t need a conviction) tripled while revenue from state forfeitures (which often do require a conviction) stagnated, according to a study by the Drug Policy Alliance.

And it pays. The LAPD was able to purchase a $5 million helicopter with funds from its equitable sharing account.

There is also a difference between civil asset forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. According to the Department of Justice, criminal forfeiture comes as part of a criminal prosecution of a defendant. Yet in civil forfeiture cases, “the property is the defendant and no criminal charge against the owner is necessary.”

While this doesn’t easily explain how property can commit a crime, it does explain why there are cases have names like U.S. v. $4,000 and U.S. v. White Cadillac, as reported by NPR.

Building momentum

On Monday, Mitchell will join Alexander, the American Civil Liberties Union and a local Black Lives Matter chapter outside the Capitol building to push for the bill along with another, which would make public the details of investigations into use of force incidents and confirmed cases of misconduct by police.

The bill died on the Assembly floor last year under massive pressure from law enforcement groups, but is eligible for reconsideration, so supporters are building momentum. The bill already passed the Senate, and it’s unclear where Gov. Jerry Brown stands on the issue.

The bill is supported by groups on both sides of the political aisle — Mitchell and Hadley penned an op-ed last year. In fact, Grover Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, came out in support of the bill last week, giving additional cover to Republicans.

“In America, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are supposed to protect our due process and property rights, civil asset forfeiture in its current form undermines these principles,” Norquist said in his statement. “This status quo in the Golden State is unacceptable.”

Late last year, momentum for the bill dissipated as the DOJ put on hold the equitable sharing program. But just last week, the DOJ was “pleased” to announce the program was back on.

Mitchell told CalWatchdog that she’s not against the program in general, just when it’s used to take property without giving due process to the owner. She said many of the reports she’s read about and heard about from voters scared her into thinking about how her and her mother could have run into similar problems on one of their many trips back from Vegas, where her mother would win jackpots playing slots.

“When I thought about it and began to hear the stories I realized that I could have been a victim,” Mitchell said. “The kinds of scenarios are so commonplace.”

She applauded state lawmakers who years ago added the conviction requirement, but said it’s time to take it one step further.

“California legislators stepped up years ago to change law, but it’s this loophole that continues to cause problems for Califorina residents,” Mitchell said.