A year after being branded by a London newspaper as America’s most lethal police force, the Bakersfield Police Department and the Kern County Sheriff’s Office are now the subjects of civil rights investigations by the state Attorney General’s Office.

Attorney General Kamala Harris, in her final month on the job, announced the probes last week. She cited media coverage and complaints from community groups and individuals about “a pattern and practice of excessive force” in Kern County’s two largest law enforcement agencies.

A Bakersfield police officer’s recent fatal shooting of Francisco Serna, an unarmed 73-year-old with a history of dementia, may have been the last straw.

But the underpinning of the state probes is the unusually thorough and expansive investigation by the Guardian. Its five-part series in December 2015 included videos and links that offered extensive substantiations for its findings.

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said his agency will cooperate with the state probe. Newly appointed Bakersfield Police Chief Lyle Martin put out a statement making a similar promise.

Their agencies had previously been less forthcoming about possible problems, according to The Guardian.

Police killed more in Kern County than New York City

“In all, 13 people have been killed so far this year by law enforcement officers in Kern County, which has a population of just under 875,000,” the newspaper wrote in December 2015. “During the same period, nine people were killed by the NYPD across the five counties of New York City, where almost 10 times as many people live and about 23 times as many sworn law enforcement officers patrol.”

“One senior Bakersfield police officer has been involved in at least four deadly shootings in less than two years. Another officer separately shot dead three people within two months in 2010. Other law enforcement officers in Kern County have meanwhile been involved in deadly beatings of unarmed men, sex crimes against women and reckless car crashes resulting in criminal convictions.”

The second part of the Guardian series framed the frequent police killings as the predictable result of a police culture in which few if any officers were held accountable for unprofessional behavior and in which citizens who challenged police conduct could pay a heavy price.

Kern County sheriff’s deputies had a confrontation with a 55-year-old man named Scotty Byrket in which “they broke his ribs, fractured his spine and stained his body with bruises,” then decided they had insufficient cause to arrest him. But after Byrket told a reporter about his mistreatment, deputies revived the case. “Byrket was arrested and charged with resisting arrest. He was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail,” the Guardrian reported. “Then, after he was released, he was arrested again and charged with resisting arrest when deputies had first arrested him for resisting arrest.”

The Guardian also noted 10 unarmed men had been killed by Kern County sheriff’s deputies since 2005 after allegedly resisting arrest. None of the deputies in the killings faced sanctions. None of the killings were reported to the FBI and three were not reported to the state, as is legally required. Three were also not disclosed to the Guardian after it made a public records request to Kern County.

Kern County’s coroner found nothing untoward in the 10 men’s deaths. Unusually, however, the coroner is Donny Youngblood, who is also the sheriff — creating a conflict of interest and meaning there are fewer checks and balances on law enforcement behavior.

The Guardian series was an outgrowth of the London newspaper’s attempts to chronicle every police killing in the United States in 2015. Because of frequent links on the traffic-generating Drudge Report, the Guardian has a following in the U.S. and a financial motive to report on U.S. events. U.S. gun violence is closely followed by many British readers.

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.

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.