Richard Stefanik also died while in police custody in September, and it could be said the cause was a broken heart. In November 2014, Stefanik was arrested for the murder of his wife of 58 years. She was suffering from cancer, and by most accounts it was a failed murder-suicide.

The death of Stefanik, in county jail, was also ruled natural.

Ornelas, 47, and Stefanik, 81, were among the 744 individuals who died last year in the custody of law enforcement or a state agency, an increase of 8 percent over the average in the last decade. The deceased included 47 women. One in five were either convicted of homicide or were awaiting trial on homicide-related charges.

Half the deaths were determined to be due to natural causes, according to data from the California Department of Justice. Thirty-four of the deaths were classified as accidental, including two by hanging or strangulation and a drug overdose.

There were also 62 deaths ruled suicides, and 96 deaths, or 13 percent, were determined to have resulted from justifiable shootings by law enforcement. One-hundred fifty-eight cases are pending investigation, 41 of them connected to an arrest in progress and 51 of them at state facilities.

In-Custody Deaths

In 2005, 62 percent of custodial deaths were determined to be natural, and 8 percent justifiable, according to a report from the state’s Attorney General.

In-custody deaths have drawn national attention following last year’s high-profile cases of Freddie Gray in Baltimore and Sandra Bland outside Houston.

Gray died while being transported to jail by police officers. Six officers are charged with murder in his death. The first case ended in a mistrial in December.

Bland’s death was ruled a jail cell suicide by hanging after she was stopped for a traffic violation and was taken in for allegedly assaulting a police officer.

Dubious classifications of death

The classifications for the recently released data in California, though, are often dubious and open to interpretation.

Among the deaths ruled suicides were those of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who in December killed 14 people in a terrorist attack on a social services office in San Bernardino County. News accounts have said the couple was killed in a shootout with police.

Also included in the death total are homicides committed by inmates, mostly referred to as accidental. And the jurisdiction is sometimes hazy in the reporting.

For example, Choi Saeteurn, 68, was allegedly beaten to death by a 35-year-old inmate in January 2015 in Sacramento County’s main jail.  In records, the death is attributed to the Azusa Police Department, located 400 miles south of Sacramento.

Also, of the 47 women’s deaths, four were attributed to suicide, including Malik’s. Six were determined to be justifiable homicide, including that of Angela Slack, who was arrested on misdemeanor prostitution charges and whose relatives posted a graphic YouTube video of her in her last days alleging that Slack was abused by police. Slack’s cause of death is listed as hanging/strangulation.  

One female death was deemed accidental, that of Sara Corliss, who died Jan. 2, 2015, and whose death in a Los Angeles County Jail is still being investigated.

In an email, the state Attorney General’s office said that each department is responsible for investigating their own custodial deaths, including the detail of those deaths.  

The California State Auditor in January released a list of agencies that have failed to address perceived problems in their operations. The state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has failed for six years to implement changes that would give inmates more supervision and to protect the safety of both inmates and corrections officers.

More than half of custodial deaths since the early 2000s have occurred in facilities run by the state.

A cadre of First Amendment groups alleges that the subcommittee of the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS) also approves action that is then rubber stamped by the CLETS advisory committee (CAC) just hours later, again failing to properly announce what will be part of a discussion determined by law to be subject to advance disclosure.

The subcommittee, called the Standing Strategic Planning Subcommittee (SSPS), is, like CAC, composed of members of law enforcement associations and state agencies who form policy on justice matters in the state.

“Since at least July 2013, [CAC] and SSPS have scheduled their meetings on the same day. SSPS convenes in the morning and votes to make recommendations, then [CAC] meets in the afternoon and votes to finalize those recommendations,” reads a July 16 letter to the law enforcement telecom committee, signed by representatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, the First Amendment Coalition and Californians Aware. “This has resulted in a system in which the public has only a few hours to analyze decisions and formulate comment before these proposals are formally approved.”

The complaint was spurred by a plan to use the drivers’ license photo and other information of Californians with law enforcement agencies nationwide for use in facial recognition databases.

That idea was scrapped after the agency received 1,500 complaints earlier this year. But it was in the final stages of approval when it was discovered after being passed via the alleged breach of the open meetings law.

During a March meeting of the CAC, David Maass, an investigative researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the board that he and others were concerned about the effort to allow federal access to state drivers license data.

According to the minutes of that meeting, in response to Maass’ comments, “SSPS Chair [Tom] Bruce stated that the SSPS makes no decisions on policies, practices and procedures and that the subcommittee’s role is strictly advisory.”

As is the role of the CLETS board, according to the DOJ website, which states that the board’s job is to “counsel and assist the Attorney General on the proper collection, storage, dissemination and security of CLETS data.”

The DOJ had already applied for a $50,000 grant to put drivers’ license data into a national database, despite the warning of the California Department of Motor Vehicles that the policy violated state privacy law.

The subcommittee did not meet for four years before being put back together in 2013 “so that there are proper eyes on the future and to deal with issues that are not generally reviewed by [CAC],” according a minutes from a July 2013 meeting.

At that time, the board was cautioned by chairman Sam Spiegel that “the subcommittee needs to abide by the 2004 Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Act, which requires public notice of meetings, agendas and an opportunity for the public to testify.”

Spiegel did not return a call.

In a joint meeting in November 2013 that was called to specify the goals of the freshly-revived subcommittee, board members noted that the sharing of drivers’ license photos nationally was not being done.

That meeting, though, launched the crusade to provide state drivers’ license photos to the feds. It was noted that the state was developing an “image warehouse” that will have facial capability.

At that time, subcommittee member Julie Basco, a representative from the state Department of Justice, said the federal law enforcement telecommunications system was seeking to include department of motor vehicle photos “though she is not aware of plans from [the feds] to create a national photo repository for DMV…”

The DOJ declined to make Basco available for an interview.

On Wednesday, the subcommittee is scheduled to meet at 9:00 a.m. followed by CAC at 1:00 p.m.

The site found that while rifles compose the bulk of the state’s prohibited registered weapons, handguns account for 90 percent of the guns used in crime noted in a state Department of Justice crime study in 2013.

From a story on the records:

“The most popular caliber on the [assault weapon ban] list, .223, accounted for a single firearm used in the crime study. Of the 105 guns, only two were registered assaults weapons.”

The article focuses on the assault weapons ban that was launched in 1989, starting with military-style assault rifles and combat shotguns, including the ones with the round magazine like the old mobsters used to favor. Over the years, lawmakers have added additional weapons to the list of those banned. People who owned those added weapons were grandfathered in, but the state’s Department of Justice keeps a registry of all banned weapons.

[Related: California eases back on gun legislation]

The registry has 145,253 weapons, 2 percent of them shotguns, 9 percent of them handguns and the rest rifles.

The list gets technical when it breaks down these banned firearms by caliber/potency. Nearly half the state registry includes weapons with a caliber that is most favored by gun advocates for home safety, the .223 caliber.

If you have to ask, probably banned

Guns are once again being targeted by California lawmakers this year, though the pace of anti-weapons legislation, seemingly on automatic for decades, has ebbed.

In previous sessions, you could scan for bills and come up with at least 100 that mentioned the word “weapon.” A search today yields 33 such bills, though the number could grow by the end of session in the fall.

Last week, a measure advanced that would bar concealed weapon permit holders from bringing their firearms to school and college campuses without permission from the school. The bill moved through a bipartisan Senate committee and on to the state Assembly.

Current law allows properly licensed individuals to carry in those places.

Other bills regarding weapons include:

• State lawmakers have tried to make sure BB and pellet guns are colorful enough for cops to discern them from the real deal.
• Under another measure, criminals convicted of firearms-related misdemeanors would be unable to possess or purchase a gun within 10 years of their conviction.
• A registered gun owner’s home address would be protected from public disclosure under Assembly Bill 1154.
• Another bill would reduce the fee for weapons licensure for members of the Armed Forces from $40 to $25.

Meanwhile, the courts are sorting out lingering issues from earlier legislation.

Those include a challenge to a requirement that gun owners in San Francisco keep their firearms stowed in a lock box in their homes, or disable them with a trigger lock, unless they’re physically carrying them. The U.S. Supreme Court was scheduled last week to consider a review of a lower court ruling against the plaintiffs, who sought to repeal the policy.

And of course there’s the “smart gun” bill from 2013, which would require owner-specific, microstamping technology on guns so that only the owner of the weapon could fire it. The requirement is on hold pending the outcome of a federal lawsuit from a gun rights group. The state prevailed in the lower courts, and the case is now on appeal.

California has some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, requiring background checks on all gun sales and banning a growing list of assault weapons — an issue explored in detail recently by the pro-gun rights site guns.com.

In recent years, crime in the Golden State has fallen while gun sales have exploded.

Sales more than doubled between 2008 and 2014, from 425,244 in 2008 to 931,037 last year, according to data collected by the state. Handgun sales went from 208,312 in 2008 to 512,174 in 2014.

[Related: Banned guns not the ones used in crimes]

Regardless, some could say the state’s firearms policies are working.

A report by the state’s Department of Justice noted that from 2012 to 2013, “every violent and property offense category decreased in number and rate per 100,000 population.”

According to the report, the violent crime rate fell, and the homicide rate, after climbing 4.2 percent in 2012, dropped 8 percent in 2013 to 4.6 murders per 100,000 people.

The crime rate has dropped before, as in 2010 when the statistics were trotted out and Gov. Brown said that “crime remains a serious problem in California, and law enforcement officials at every level must redouble their efforts to ensure public safety.” Even back in 2006, the state had relatively low levels of crime, ranking 14th in the U.S. for violent crimes.

Some have pointed to the firearm prohibition laws as the reason for the drop.

“At a domestic level, California is a prime example of legal reform curbing gun violence,” wrote Isaac Saidel-Goley in a report in February at the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy’s Harvard chapter. “Over the past 20 years, California – along with a few other states, including Massachusetts and New York – has pioneered the domestic implementation of gun control by passing laws enacting widespread firearm regulation, including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, prohibiting individuals from openly carrying firearms in public, prohibiting domestic violence abusers from acquiring firearms, and establishing numerous firearm safety standards.

“These gun control laws have achieved remarkable success in preventing gun violence.”

Gun advocates, however, credit the increase in weapons purchased, a theory advanced in the 1998 book by academic John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com