Sitting state senator passes

Sad news today: State Sen. Sharon Runner has died.

The Lancaster Republican has battled health issues for sometime, having survived a double lung transplant in recent years. She announced earlier this year that she would not run for re-election.

“Sharon Runner’s life was one of service,” California Republican Party Chairman Jim Brulte told The Sacramento Bee. “Whether it was establishing a Christian day school to help educate children, serving first in the California State Assembly and then in the California State Senate, or fighting for initiatives to protect families in California – Sharon was committed to the people of her community and our great state.”

• After shooting an unarmed teenager last month, Fresno PD took a rare step Wednesday by releasing body camera footage of the incident. The Los Angeles Times has more. 
• Newly uncovered court documents allege Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones — a Republican who is challenging Rep. Ami Bera, R-Elk Grove, for his seat in Congress — made unwanted sexual advances toward a subordinate. The Sacramento Bee has more.   
• Sending a 550-person delegation to Ohio for the Republican National Convention is neither easy nor cheap, reports Capital Public Radio. 
• “Last week, a coalition of California Central Valley water districts sued the Bureau of Reclamation in the latest installment of the litigation wars over the delta smelt.  The new lawsuit, filed in federal district court in Fresno, and coming on the heels of the Governor Brown administration’s announcement to release an additional annual 200,000 acre-feet of water for the smelt, challenges the Bureau’s recent issuance of an environmental impact statement purportedly assessing the effects that the smelt-inspired water cutbacks have had on the San Joaquin Valley,” writes the Pacific Legal Foundation.

Legislature:

• Gone ’til August

Gov. Brown:

• On vacation

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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.

Good morning. Happy Hump Day. 

Sure as the sun rises every morning, every election cycle Playboy legend Hugh Hefner gives to Loretta Sanchez’s congressional races — having given $10,400 to Sanchez’s Senate campaign.

By now, everyone in Orange County and Washington knows the story: Hefner gives to Sanchez and occasionally it gets her in trouble. But Hefner doesn’t appear to have a connection with Sanchez’s congressional district, and she’s known mostly for her policy expertise in military and national security issues, so answering “why” is challenging, although it most likely has to do with who Sanchez unseated 20 years ago to get to Washington: “B-1” Bob Dornan.

CalWatchdog has more.

In other news:  

• Remember the Orange County jailbreak earlier this year? New information shows “sheriff’s deputies failed to search construction workers and school instructors working inside the jail,” while “jailers did nothing to inventory potentially dangerous or useful tools being carried into the jail, or to make sure that the tools left with workers, even after sharp cutting blades were left behind on two occasions near inmate housing areas prior to the escape,” writes The Orange County Register. Oops!
• A new report suggests that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is not weeding out low-performing deputies in their first year, which potentially causes problems later on and in life-or-death situations. The Los Angeles Times has more.
• And two bills that would have increased transparency of law enforcement, including increased access to police disciplinary records and body camera footage died on Tuesday in the state Senate. The Los Angeles Times has more.
• And The Sacramento Bee writes what it’s like for two innocent men and their struggles to get money for years spent in prison. 

Assembly:

• Full day of hearings. 

Senate:

• Full day of hearings.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

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The results of a new poll, touted by activist groups, revealed a constituency for continued re-adjustments in the balance between what law enforcement can do and what residents must expect.

Broad discontent

Commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union, the July survey found that “voters want increased access to police records, including misconduct investigations and body camera footage,” as the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported, with 79 percent asking departments “to release their findings when an officer is investigated for wrong doing.”

A further 64 percent support the same practice, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf observed, “anytime a cop is even accused.”

State law affords a level of privacy to officers that has remained among the most stringent in the country, the Tribune noted, “making it impossible for the public to know when or if an officer received discipline, regardless of the accusation.”

Skepticism toward law enforcement secrecy has cast suspicion on the groundbreaking use of body cameras adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department — a move seen until fairly recently as a great leap forward in official transparency. “The LAPD policy — approved by the Police Commission on a 3-1 vote in April — allows officers to review images from the cameras before writing reports or giving statements to internal investigators,” as the Los Angeles Times reported. “The department has also said it does not plan to publicly release the recordings unless they are part of a criminal or civil court proceeding.”

Attention around the poll was heightened as the Golden State headed into its latest high-profile ballot initiative season. With criminal justice and drug war issues at the forefront of many voters’ minds, some analysts detected “an opportunity for policing-reform activists and ambitious politicians” impatient to take on the state’s powerful police unions; “a statewide ballot initiative that takes aim at law-enforcement secrecy could win over voters in 2016,” suggested Friedersdorf.

Limited gains

Sacramento saw a spate of bills this year focused on reforming criminal justice and policing. One ongoing effort, to curb the excessive use of asset forfeiture laws, continued to work its way through the Assembly. Senate Bill 443, authored by Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, placed “additional restrictions on the state to prevent abuses from civil asset forfeiture, a controversial practice that observers such as the Institute for Justice have called ‘legal plunder,'” according to the Tenth Amendment Center.

But some proposals have run aground in Sacramento, setting legislators up for populist criticism that they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — deliver on their promises. “After vowing to tackle policing this year, California legislators have had a mixed record: a bill banning the use of grand juries to investigate officer killings became law, while measures regulating the use of police body cameras have stumbled,” as the Sacramento Bee noted.

“The remaining focus for civil liberties advocates is Assembly Bill 953, which would require local law enforcement to gather and report data on stops in an effort to suss out racial profiling. It cleared the Assembly floor on a narrow vote and, despite the opposition of law enforcement groups and an estimate that it would cost millions of dollars annually, got out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.”

AB953, named the Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015, has drawn the endorsement of the ACLU and minority rights groups. Introduced by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, the bill’s centerpiece reflected the view among supporters that policing standards could only be improved by centralizing them — altering California’s “state definition of profiling to include identity characteristics beyond race, creating a uniform system for collecting and reporting basic information on police-community interactions, and establishing an advisory board that develops solutions to curb profiling,” according to the ACLU. Current polling, the organization added, shows roughly two thirds of likely state voters approve of the legislation.

But in Oakland, it appears authorities will only release the body-camera videos when they exonerate police, and that the video will be kept from the public and the media in other circumstances on the grounds that it is part of an ongoing investigation. The East Bay Express recently reported on how the Oakland police are dealing with four police killings. In two cases, Police Chief Sean Whent won’t release any body-cam footage. In the other two cases, police wouldn’t release the footage to the public. Instead, on Aug. 19, the Oakland Police Department held a screening for 11 members of the media.

This account is from the East Bay Express:

[The] videos included police body camera footage taken by officers who were chasing Richard Linyard and Nathaniel Wilks (in two separate incidents). On July 19, Linyard was allegedly fleeing the police on foot when he was later found wedged between two buildings. A coroner’s report said Linyard died from injuries he suffered when he was apparently stuck between the buildings.

 

On August 12, Wilks allegedly fled the police in a vehicle and then on foot. Several officers confronted and shot Wilks near the intersection of 27th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.

 

Watson said OPD showed videos to select members of the media in order to dispel inaccurate reports that officers beat Linyard, and claims that Wilks was shot in the back. Both incidents sparked protests. “We held the viewing in the interest of the public, to be able to share information through fair and balanced reporting,” said Watson.

 

Watson, however, said that the video footage will not be released to the broader public, and that OPD believes the California Public Records Act allows the department to withhold the footage because it is evidence in several ongoing investigations.

‘Completely wrong’ to withhold some video

As the Bay Area News Group reported, giving the police the right to pick and choose which videos to release outraged local civil-rights lawyer Jim Chanin. “I think it’s completely wrong to have selective showings of one shooting and not another shooting, depending on how the department feels . … There’s an inference now that if (police) don’t show you a video, there could be something wrong or improper about (another) shooting,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, a bill that would establish statewide procedures on access to and use of policy body-camera footage appears to have failed, U-T San Diego columnist Steve Greenhut wrote on Friday.

In April, a comprehensive bill by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, passed its initial committee vote. Per its official description, “Assembly Bill 66 would provide guidelines about when the cameras are to be operated, require notification of those being recorded, and prohibit law-enforcement officers involved in serious use-of-force incidents that result in serious bodily injury or death from viewing the video until they have filed an initial report.” Whent, the Oakland police chief, testified in favor of the bill.

But Weber’s bill was effectively killed within weeks. As Dan Walters wrote in the Sacramento Bee:

Weber’s body camera bill was beaten up in the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. Police unions, whose endorsements politicians crave, strongly opposed it as unfair, and the committee insisted that only local authorities decide when cops can see body videos.

Despite the polarized political atmosphere that has surrounded the shooting, everything about the incident has seemed to complicate a clear judgment. On the one hand, the events leading up to and including the killing have been caught on videotape from multiple security sources. On the other, the video evidence failed to exonerate or condemn the officers involved.

Although five shots can be heard — suggesting potentially excessive force was used on the man police seemed to overpower — one officer can also be heard warning that the suspect had gained control of his gun.

That was just the beginning of the strange twists emerging in the case. The deceased was known on the street as a former mental health patient named Africa. But Africa had a considerably more complex past.

In the late 1990s, CBS reported, the man successfully perpetrated an identity theft of a French citizen named Charley Saturmin Robinet, according to Axel Cruau, France’s consul general in Los Angeles. Using the name to secure a French passport, he traveled to the United States in ostensible pursuit of an acting career.

Instead of notoriety on stage or screen, however, the man eventually known as Africa ended up on the wrong end of a botched bank robbery in Thousand Oaks. Along with two others, he was arrested — a development that initially triggered a typical level of assistance from the French Consulate.

When it emerged that Africa was not in fact Robinet — or even French — he wound up in the mental health unit of a federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota. According to federal officials, CBS noted, “Medical staff determined he was suffering from ‘a mental disease or defect’ that required treatment in a psychiatric hospital.”

Remarkably, Africa’s nationality has still not been established, although on the street he was understood to call Cameroon his home country. As ABC News reported, court documents show he was released on May 12 of last year, having spent 14 years in prison. How he wound up on Skid Row remained unclear.

Messy fault lines

In light of the bizarre circumstances surrounding the case, the political controversy it created has taken on a complex and uncertain cast. For one thing, Africa had established a pattern of conflict with the LAPD.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, cops routinely struggled to make him comply with a court agreement that requires street tents to be taken down by 6 a.m. For another, two of the officers involved in Africa’s killing were equipped with bodycams — yielding footage the department claims will help exonerate them.

What’s more, Police Chief Charlie Beck underscored that the implicated cops had gone through the city’s most rigorous and carefully targeted program concerning altercations with the mentally ill and homeless.

According to the Times:

“Beck said Monday that the officers involved in the shooting were part of the Safer Cities Initiative — an LAPD task force specifically focused on skid row — and were ‘specially trained in dealing with homeless people and mental health issues.’ Some of the officers involved had undergone the department’s ‘most extensive mental illness training,’ which he described as a 36-hour course.”

As a result, Africa’s shooting fit poorly into the pattern of LAPD scandals that has attracted such negative press and public opinion in recent years. In the wake of the 1999 Rampart corruption ordeal, federal oversight of the force was imposed by “consent decree” and lifted only in 2013.

In August of last year, cops came under intense scrutiny for the back-to-back deaths of Omar Abrego and Ezell Ford, an unarmed mentally ill man.

Although a groundswell of public opinion has yet to form around Africa’s case one way or the other, a small but seething crowd of protestors descended on Tuesday’s weekly meeting of the Police Commission. Steve Diaz, one organizer in attendance, accused the Safer Cities Initiative of putting Skid Row under “police occupation” in order to hasten so-called gentrification around the neighborhood.

August Vollmer, police chief in Berkeley, California, from 1905 to 1932, advocated the hiring of college graduates and offered the first collegiate course in police science at the University of California. Vollmer is also famous for the development of the principles of modern police administration. Advocates of the concepts of administrative efficiency sought to “centralize the authority within police departments” and to “rationalize the procedures of command control.”

But now, the hottest police reform proposal in years — mandating that patrol officers wear cameras in response to concerns about police brutality — is being stalled in Northern California’s largest city. The Mercury-News has details:

SAN JOSE — Amid a national push for police officers to wear body cameras, San Jose’s efforts to equip its officers have stalled for years, most recently waiting for the city and its police union to agree on a policy covering the use of cameras. …

As of Friday, department and union officials say there is no clear timetable for when the first San Jose officers will be equipped with the tiny cameras. In 2013, the Santa Clara County Police Chiefs Association agreed on a use policy for body-worn cameras. But union leaders say the array of privacy issues posed by the devices means their deployment has to pair with the creation of a more comprehensive policy that protects officers’ rights by limiting who can access the footage. …

The next union-city meeting on the issue is set for Jan. 5. Even if an agreement was reached then and there, it could still be years before the cameras hit the streets. …

“There’s this race to get body cams on police as soon as possible, but it’s a very complex issue,” said Officer James Gonzales, incoming vice president of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association. “We realize these are law-enforcement tools of the future. Our goal is to make sure our process is thoughtful.”

‘Indict-o-cams’? Or police protection?

The idea that patrol officers’ conduct while on the job is protected by privacy rights is kind of a head-scratcher when it comes to their interactions with the public in general, not just with criminal suspects. The ACLU has made the obvious point that giving police broad discretion as to when to have their cameras on means that bad cops will just turn them off before doing bad things. This New York Daily News article cites worries about officers having to film themselves while using bathrooms. That seems like a pretty weak argument.

But the NYDN piece also makes a good point about why police officers are likely to eventually come around. The cameras don’t just capture their bad behavior. Cameras can protect them if they behave properly but witness testimony and physical evidence suggest otherwise:

Equipping police with cameras isn’t a new concept. For decades police have used cameras mounted to the dashboards of their patrol cars — initially referred to with suspicion by officers as “indict-o-cams” until they discovered the footage exonerated them in most cases.

Yet this also is a time when concerns about data harvesting and government surveillance are also increasing. So questions remain as to whether augmenting oversight with “foolproof” technology contributes to a frame of mind that doesn’t serve civil liberties as much as advocates might hope.

California’s on-body camera experiment is already underway in Los Angeles. As the Los Angeles Times reports, Police commissioner Steve Soboroff led the push, raising $1 million for an effort expected to culminate in some 600 body cams to be used across the LAPD. But with Police Chief Charlie Beck describing the cameras as “the future of policing,” future growth seems assured, barring some unexpected mishap.

Who, indeed, wants to be seen taking a stand against the future — especially the future of public safety? In San Diego, the Times points out, politicians are lining up to endorse the rosy view. There, the city council has allocated twice Los Angeles’ planned spend, with city officials joining the incoming and outgoing chief of police in embracing cop cams.

Southern California’s swell of institutional support is a strong indication of one powerful trend — government enthusiasm toward enlisting technology in pursuit of public safety perfection. The case for videocams on police pitches a dual rationale that seems to benefit both those who govern and those who are governed. Citizens get a body of evidence in the event of officer misconduct. And officers — and departments — get protection from adverse verdicts and costly settlements in litigation surrounding alleged abuse.

What’s missing from that balanced equation, however, is a reckoning with the broader implications of perpetual police surveillance. The logic behind ubiquitous officer-mounted video does not stop with miniature automated camcorders.

Wired

The degree to which cops are “wired” is limited only by the state of the technological art. The New York City Police Department predictably now is testing Google Glass for use on the streets. The “future of policing” permitted by technology is a future where police operations work more and more like military ones — with officers back at headquarters closely monitoring and directing cops in the field, using real-time, first-person video and information.

For civil liberties advocates concerned about what The Washington Post’s Radley Balko calls “the rise of the warrior cop,” that’s not exactly a reason for optimism. So long as no-knock raids, aggressive SWAT techniques, and unreasonable or warrantless searches flourish under judicial protection, invasive and violent policing can become the norm, no matter how well-documented.

It’s a process that can be accelerated by Americans’ frequent sense that a muscular, active police force is a sign of social and political progress, and by the pipeline that so often leads prosecuting attorneys “who get results” to seek and gain higher political office.

Yet the main argument against the trend set by on-body police cameras fails to think very far ahead. The American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, which generally accepts the move toward cop cams, focuses almost entirely on ensuring that cameras cannot be edited or turned off by the cops who wear them.

Yet many Americans are very uncomfortable with the idea of “always-on” webcams embedded in their video game consoles. Isn’t the always-on issue even more salient when it’s an entire police force equipped in that way?

Not only is the bodycam trend apt to feed — and increase — the huge federal and other government appetite for monitoring and databasing. It’s also likely to atrophy our shared standards of individual responsibility, neighborhood trust and civic freedom.

In a world where every interaction with an officer is monitored, recorded, overseen and archived, our relationship to power is fundamentally changed — even if the kind of extralegal abuse associated with high-profile litigation against police departments disappears.

Now at the forefront of the tech revolution in policing, California’s often anti-establishmentarian citizens have a unique opportunity to question whether “the system” should forever be put between every private person and every law enforcement official.