The first of the policies was Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2011 decision to “realign” the corrections system and shift 30,000 prisoners from state institutions to county jails. With many county facilities as overcrowded as state prisons, this led to an estimated release of 18,000 people who were incarcerated in California. The second was state voters’ 2014 approval of Proposition 47, which reclassified some drug and property crime offenses from felonies to misdemeanors, which also led to more convicted criminals avoiding getting locked up. It was strongly supported by the governor.

What’s been the effect? That is a crucial question, given that California’s violent crime rate jumped significantly in the first half of 2015. In California’s 68 cities with populations of 100,000 or more, violent crime increased by 11 percent, according to statistics compiled by the FBI.

This suggests that “realignment” and Prop. 47 might have a cumulative effect. A December 2013 report by the Public Policy Institute of California downplayed any link between a smaller increase in violent crime in 2011 and 2012 and the effects of “realignment”:

We find that California’s crime rates increased between 2011 and 2012 — violent crime went up 3.4 percent and property crime went up 7.6 percent. These rates vary widely across the state, with California’s 10 largest counties generally seeing greater increases in crime than in the state overall. However, despite this pattern of increase, crime rates remain at historically low levels in California today.

 

How does realignment relate to the recent uptick in crime? Our analysis of violent crime finds no evidence that realignment has had an effect on the most serious offenses, murder and rape. The evidence on robbery is more uncertain, with a possible indication of a modest increase related to realignment. California’s overall increases in violent crime between 2011 and 2012 appear to be part of a broader upward trend also experienced in other states.

Did reducing felonies help ‘the crooks win’?

Now, 17 months after Proposition 47’s adoption, opinions are beginning to harden on its effects.

In November, Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell depicted the initiative as a well-intentioned failure. And on PoliceOne.com, a website on police issues, a December opinion piece declared “the crooks won.”

Inmates are fans of Prop. 47 because it keeps them out of jail, allowing them to keep using illegal drugs and keep committing crime. Even if they miss their court date (which in turn gives them a warrant), inmates know the crimes and the misdemeanor warrants will not keep them locked up long. Inmates view misdemeanors as “not a big deal” and shrug their shoulders. It does not matter that there are hardworking citizens who are being victimized. Criminals usually never show remorse or empathy for their victims. Criminals have a great way of decriminalizing and minimizing their crimes. With Prop. 47, the state and the criminals both are doing just that.

But William Lansdowne, a veteran California police chief, strongly challenges this assessment in an op-ed posted Thursday by the San Francisco Chronicle:

Since Prop. 47 passed, critics have tried to scapegoat it for a rise in crime, but there’s no evidence proving such an assertion. As the former police chief for San Diego, San Jose and Richmond, I know all too well that every shift in crime must be addressed. There is nothing more important than public safety. But in paying close attention, we need to be honest about the facts and avoid misleading the public.

‘The studies are not done and the results aren’t in’

Others suggest that both McDonnell and Lansdown are too quick to draw conclusions:

Keramet Reiter, a criminology professor at UC Irvine, said the ballot measure has been used by critics as a “convenient scapegoat” for the rise in crime. The reality, she said, is more complicated in a state that is undergoing broad changes to its criminal justice system, including a massive shift of inmates from state prisons to local jails.

 

The Los Angeles Police Department has reported a double-digit increase in property crime so far this year, but Chief Charlie Beck said it is premature to fault Proposition 47.

 

“The studies are not done and the results aren’t in,” Beck said.

That is from a November Los Angeles Times report.

The rise of Big Data has led to many changes in policing strategies in recent years, most notably in New York City, where the NYPD uses algorithms to predict likely trouble spots. But big-think arguments over why crime has gone down sharply over the last 25 year have actually gotten more complex, not less. Last year, Vox detailed 16 different theories explaining the phenomenon.

Introduced last year, Senate Bill 11, the first, has begun to gather steam as lawmakers have fleshed out the legislation with more specific provisions. The bill would mandate a basic training course on how to recognize and de-escalate conflict involving “persons with mental illness or intellectual disability who are in crisis,” upping substantially the hours of education required for cops.

“The bill would require that this evidence-based behavioral health classroom training course be 20 hours long and be in addition to the basic training course’s current hour requirement,” according to the language of SB11, which would also require ongoing updates to the course as part of so-called “perishable skills training.”

SB11 has taken on a new relevance as the Senate Select Committee on Mental Health held a special hearing in L.A.’s Exposition park. As the Sacramento Bee reported, lawmakers called on “current and former law enforcement officers from the CHP, the San Diego Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as well as representatives of Disability Rights California and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.” State Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, took the opportunity to voice her support for SB11, along with SB29, a similar bill initially introduced, like SB11, by state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose.

A pattern of shootings

After a brutal CHP beating of a mentally ill 51-year-old woman this July, advocates have been up in arms against what they identify as a pattern of police abuse. Those tensions spilled over as, over the past two months, L.A. saw cops shoot dead two homeless men. Both Charly Keunang of Skid Row and Brendon Glenn of Venice were “combative, but not armed,” NBC Los Angeles reported. “Keunang had been diagnosed with mental illness while in prison. Glenn suffered from alcohol abuse, according to those who knew him. Both cases remain under investigation.”

A contentious town hall meeting in L.A.’s Venice neighborhood that focused on Glenn’s death drew a powerful wave of criticism as Police Chief Charlie Beck and Mayor Eric Garcetti both opted not to attend. “Several people who attended Thursday night’s meeting faulted Beck and Mayor Garcetti for not being there,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Beck rebuffed the criticism of the mayor, saying it was ‘unfair’ because previous mayors hadn’t attended similar events in the past.”

Although California police face thousands upon thousands of situations involving the mentally ill, only a relative handful have recently culminated in police shootings. Nevertheless, the pattern of outcomes that has emerged this year put the California Highway Patrol and the Los Angeles Police Department on the defensive.

“Every year, the Los Angeles Police Department responds to some 14,000 calls for service involving mentally disturbed individuals,” LAPD Lieutenant Brian Bixler, officer in charge of the Crisis Response Support Section, told NBC Los Angeles. The share of ensuing events involving police violence and mental health problems has been massive, the network reported.

“Encounters with the mentally ill, or those affected by substance abuse, account for a disproportionate number of the uses of force by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department” — around 40 percent, as Sheriff Jim McDonnell told the Select Committee.

A statewide challenge

Observers have warned that law enforcement troubles with mentally ill individuals have arisen in part because of California’s failure to adequately house them. According to the Marin Independent Journal, in 1960, “California had a population of 15 million and 37,000 mental hospital beds; by 2010, the state’s population had grown to 37 million and there were only 4,000 mental hospital beds.”

After a spate of enforcement scandals that raised the ire of many in Los Angeles, bodycams began to catch on as a policy measure that could shield police from wrongful litigation and protect citizens from civil rights abuses.

But with continued nationwide unrest surrounding police misconduct — culminating in presidential candidate Hillary Clinton voicing support for nationwide body cameras — the significance of California’s approach to the technology took on an increased importance.

Controversial legislation

In an effort to tip the balance of the bodycam advantage less in favor of police, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, introduced AB 66, a bill intended to limit police access to material videotaped on their own bodycams.

“By a 5 to 1 vote, the Assembly Public Safety Committee approved AB 66, which includes the controversial provision that prohibits police officers from viewing body camera footage before writing their reports,” U-T San Diego noted. According to Weber and the civil libertarians supporting her proposal, the importance of keeping bodycam evidence under wraps outweighs the inconvenience police will face as a result.

But, as NPR reported, “many law enforcement groups aren’t buying that. They have rallied in opposition to the measure, saying it that would undermine accurate police reports — and that it presumes that the police will lie.”

Interviewed previously by U-T San Diego, “Weber said the primary role of body cameras is to de-escalate incidents between police and the general public, not to serve as a reference for officers as they write reports.”

A rival workaround

While Sacramento and law enforcement debate the bill, California’s ACLU chapter has taken matters into their own hands. A new app created by the group, called “Mobile Justice CA,” gave users the ability to “record cell phone videos of possible cases of police misconduct and then quickly save the footage to the organization’s computer servers,” as Reuters reported. “The California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said the app will send the video to the organization and preserve it even if a phone is seized by police or destroyed.”

Mobile Justice CA will even push an alert to nearby users’ phones, allowing them to seek out the location of the possible misconduct and observe the situation firsthand.

Municipal disagreement

The city of Los Angeles, which pioneered the gradual introduction of bodycams into a troubled metropolitan environment, also took fresh steps to implement a more formal regime regulating the way the devices are used.

The L.A. Police Commission recently voted to codify new rules covering bodycams, but not without a fight. As CBS Los Angeles reported, “Commissioner Robert Saltzman cast the lone dissenting vote after an often-contentious debate that lasted nearly two hours, saying he was ‘frustrated’ that commissioners and the public were not able to view and comment on the policies before the LAPD reached an agreement with the police officers’ union.”

But Commission President Steve Soboroff, an early and vocal supporter of the cameras, “argued that the public has had many opportunities to give input and that the commission will have the opportunity to re-assess the policies once the officers have actually put the body cameras to use.”

Election-year politics

Adding a final layer of complexity to the clash of interests around body cameras, state Attorney General Kamala Harris, currently angling to replace outgoing Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Ca., has vowed to equip special agents employed by the state Department of Justice with bodycameras of their own. “With increased focus on allegations of racial bias and police violence across the country, Harris earlier this year directed her division of law enforcement to review the Justice Department’s own special agent training on implicit bias and use of force,” the Sacramento Bee noted.

The “right to rest” movement has picked up steam first on the West Coast, with similar bills under review in the Hawaii and Oregon legislatures.

Following suit, state Sen. Carol Liu, D-La Cañada-Flintridge, introduced Senate Bill 608, known as the Right to Rest Act. Using broad language written by the Western Regional Advocacy Project, the bill would enshrine such actions as eating in public and occupying legally parked cars as “basic human and civil rights.”

What’s more, SB608 would authorize someone discriminated against in the use of public space to sue to enforce their newly codified rights in a civil action.

In a statement, Liu described homelessness as a “social,” not criminal, issue. “Citing homeless people for resting in a public space can lead to their rejection for jobs, education loans and housing, further denying them a pathway out of poverty,” she said.

Last month, Berkeley Law’s Policy Advocacy Clinic released a report on “the growing enactment and enforcement of anti-homeless laws in the Golden State.” In a forceful denunciation of California’s current homeless policies, the Clinic pushed for the kind of changes WRAP helped draft into model legislation:

“Without state-level intervention, California cities have been engaged in a race to the bottom by increasing criminalization, hoping to drive homeless people elsewhere and make them someone else’s problem. Comprehensive reform must target the full range of state codes and municipal laws that criminalize homelessness.”

A pressure cooker

SB608 comes at a time when homeless issues in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles have gained a higher profile as a result of rising rents in urban cores.

As CalWatchdog.com reported, the Skid Row shooting of the man known as Africa drew sharp rebuke from community activists in downtown Los Angeles, some of whom pinned blame on the LAPD’s new Safer Cities Initiative. That effort targeted Skid Row — now at the frontier of downtown’s gentrification — with increased monitoring conducted in part by cops with beefed-up training in how to interact with the homeless and mentally unwell.

Critics noted that, although the initiative launched in 2006 by then-police chief William Bratton cut crime, it imposed an unending series of infractions on the homeless. Activists complained that more than half of Skid Row-area homeless had been arrested in the past year.

The problem seemed cyclical: one reason why Skid Row hosted one of the densest populations of homeless in America was because the surrounding areas had seen a robust influx of new renters and owners, raising housing costs.

Mainstreaming a worldview

Despite the fairly radical, social-justice approach taken by the activists who are shaping “right to rest” legislation, the agenda found an advocate in Liu, widely perceived as safely mainstream. On her official website, Liu recently touted her perfect legislative track record last year, when she went eight for eight of her bills enacted into law.

For Paul Boden, director of WRAP, activists’ appropriate ambitions reached nationwide. Himself homeless as a teen, Boden has volunteered and worked on homeless issues for 30 years.

Now he has sensed the stars are aligning for a push that extends far beyond the West Coast. Boden insisted, “From Hawaii to New York and from Maine to Texas, it’s time for this to stop.”

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.

It also now takes just one click to go from the department’s landing page to the reports. The most recent annual use-of-force report now covers the first half of 2014. The site now provides a 2013 officer discipline report for the fourth quarter.

The website also cites the decree requirement for the posting of the reports, which comes from the 2000 consent decree between the LAPD and the U.S. Department of Justice in the wake of the Rampart scandal in which a gang unit connected to the division was infected with corruption. The decree mandated:

“Under the terms of the agreement with the Justice Department, the LAPD was required to make available on its website reports on use of force and complaints to include “a summary of all discipline imposed during the period reported by type of misconduct, broken down by type of discipline, bureau and rank…”

The LAPD, like other law-enforcement bodies around the United States, has vowed to be more open with in its police procedures in the wake of last year’s spate of fatal police encounters with young men in several cities.

On Jan. 22, Cmdr. Andrew Smith, an LAPD spokesman, told the Los Angeles Times the department’s failure to post the reports was “not intentional, and the department would be posting the latest reports.”

Sheriffs

Ironically, the LAPD’s lax condition came to light in a Dec. 31, 2014 report on another law-enforcement agency. It was the County of Los Angeles Office of Inspector General’s “Recommendation to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for Public Data Disclosure.”

The report mainly pointed out the county sheriff’s office has been deficient in posting officer discipline action on its website.

But it also revealed the LAPD had not posted its quarterly summary of officer discipline since 2012 or its annual use of force report since 2010. Yet both data sets were supposed to be posted under the terms of the 2000 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that ended in May 2013.

The department had failed to post quarterly discipline reports since the 3rd quarter of 2012, seven months before the decree requiring the reports ended. It does not appear, though, that the department violated any oversight provisions.

According to the Inspector General’s report:

“In 2009 and 2010, the LAPD published on its website ‘Annual Use of Force Reports.’ Although it appears this practice was shortlived, these reports were detailed as to statistics on officer-involved shootings, animal shootings, unintentional discharge incidents, and other uses of lethal force or force resulting in significant injury.”

Further, the information was deemed difficult for a viewer to find:

“The Use of Force Annual Report and the Quarterly Discipline Reports were not easily accessible on the LAPD’s website. These reports were found under the subheadings of ‘Police Commission’ and ‘Special Assistant for Constitutional 11 Policing.’ A citizen unfamiliar with these terms and their meaning might find it difficult to find these reports.”

An email to Smith regarding the updated site and the lack of current reports on the website was not returned. And a person answering the department’s media line requested an email query, which was also not returned.

The reports are especially valuable in a state in which all law enforcement disciplinary records are uniquely private, said Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California. “It’s only through these reports that the public has any idea what’s going on,” he said

He understood there can be a lag time as the disciplinary process for an officer runs its course, “but just the number of instances of force should come fairly promptly.”

Body cameras and transparency

Last December, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti promised every LAPD officer soon would be wearing a body camera.

“The trust between a community and its police department can be eroded in a single moment,” Garcetti said during a press conference to announce the initiative. “Trust is built on transparency.”

But LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said any video coming from the body cameras would not be released under the state’s public records law, claiming the investigative records exemption.

“I think people misunderstand transparency as having everybody and all the public have access to everything,” Beck told the Times. “And it isn’t so much that as having the ability for oversight by multiple entities outside of the Police Department. I think that’s the meaning of transparency.”

In the past, Beck has been more welcoming of a transparent application of policing, although his endorsement of such came with an interpretation of the state’s public records law.

Upon his appointment in 2009, he told a gathering of LA Times editors and reporters that part of being a police officer is the understanding that “you give up some right to anonymity that most other people enjoy. Unfortunately, state law doesn’t agree with me on that.”

In a recent message posted on the LAPD site, Beck asserted “trust is built on the truth and truth is displayed through transparency.”

The LAPD hired the top-flight PR firm Burson-Marsteller to charm L.A. residents and their representatives, according to the Los Angeles Times:

“Next month, union and city negotiators are scheduled to meet with an independent mediator who will try to help the two sides reach a deal. The two sides have dug in, taking positions that seem irreconcilable: With the city still trying to recover from years of financial crisis, [L.A. Mayor Eric] Garcetti has said the city will not grant raises this year — a stance the police have rebuffed as unacceptable.”

Growing frustration

In the wake of several high-profile national instances of racially charged violence involving law enforcement, public opinion has shifted against police unions. On the left, prominent commentators including Bill Maher have decried their potential for abuses of power.

“This is why Americans hate unions now,” said Maher in a recent broadcast. “It’s why Republicans have been able to make ‘taking on the unions’ an applause line.”

On the right, meanwhile, libertarian analysts have portrayed police unions as no different from collective-bargaining organizations elsewhere in the public sector. Public unions and governments, wrote Reason’s Ed Krayewski, “are incentivized to cooperate to each other’s benefit, at the expense of taxpayers, who foot the bill for the contract goodies and later from any wrongdoing the contract demands is defended.”

At the same time, the LAPD’s halting efforts to rehabilitate its reputation among Angelenos have made modest but fragile gains. Its recent turn toward body camera coverage for cops on the beat has received cautiously optimistic reviews.

But a Times report last year, revealing expensive and endemic abuses of injury leave among L.A. cops and firefighters, epitomized the scope of the department’s credibility problem:

“City leaders across California say the very design of the injured-on-duty program, IOD for short, invites abuse. Because injury pay is exempt from both federal and state income taxes, public safety employees typically take home significantly more money when they’re not working. And time spent on leave counts toward pension benefits.”

Summing up the hurdles facing the force, attorney Merrick Bobb, a court-appointed monitor who oversaw the Sheriff’s Department, recently told WYPR the LAPD has gone “from being, in essence, an occupying army to being a community partner.”

But, in a twist that could add fuel to the political fire surrounding police unions, the new president of the LAPD’s union, Craig Lally, appeared on a notorious list of “problem officers” drawn up in the wake of the 1992 riots touched off by the Rodney King beating.

Political crosswinds

But for all its increased sense of community, the LAPD has appeared less willing to go with the flow of the negative mood surrounding any kind of public union. The cost and excess of public unions has now become a lead issue in California politics.

Gov. Jerry Brown has struggled to impose restraint on public employees, slamming the California Public Employees Retirement System for awarding higher pensions and the University of California Board of Regents for increasing tuition.

These conflicts are set to continue long into the new year. Republicans will continue to hit Democrats for being too permissive toward public unions. Democrats will keep casting Republicans as too accommodating toward police unions.

Meanwhile, violent crime in Los Angeles spiked last year by over 14 percent. From the standpoint of police, that’s reason enough for an increase in pay.

But from the standpoint of a growing number of Californians, unionized public employees are already too well compensated.

Even if the LAPD persuades Angelenos that it’s on their side, residents may well oppose swelling salaries, regardless of their party affiliation.

In a detailed history of the so-called militarization of California police, the New York Times interviewed critics and defenders of the Davis vehicle, which carries a price tag of $700,000. “All of this equipment is needed, and this makes obtaining such equipment affordable,” said Christopher Boyd, president of the California Police Chiefs Association. “Armored vehicles are extremely valuable. They are very expensive. Most police departments cannot afford to buy them.”

A traumatizing incident

According to the Times, analysts said that the popularity of heavy arms on the force traces back to 1997 and the infamous “North Hollywood shootout,” wherein two bank robbers clad in body armor outgunned cops for an hour before being killed. “The North Hollywood incident really was the catalyst that told us it was time to make sure that we armed our deputies in the field,” recalled Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown.

Although CNN reported at the time of the shootout that officers had to commandeer supplies from a nearby gun store to mount an adequate defense, none of the 10 police officers or 15 bystanders injured in the melee faced life-threatening injuries. As the CNN report emphasized, however, the LAPD cops who first arrived on the scene carried nothing more powerful than their standard-issue 9mm Beretta handguns.

Bulking up on the cheap

In the mid-1990s, California cops typically packed a shotgun at most, with few even carrying a rifle, according to a Contra Costa Times review. The suddenly alarming and embarrassing situation played a key role in shifting priorities and attitudes for state law enforcement agencies. But California’s police militarization kicked into high gear during a perfect storm of tightening state budgets and growing federal largesse. As the Times noted, cash-strapped state PDs jumped at the chance to exploit programs created by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security as the war on terror geared up.

Militarization in Southern California, however, wound up spreading beyond the LAPD, which has long led the trend thanks to city concerns over gang violence. The Contra Costa Times report highlights the Baldwin Park Unified School District’s three automatic rifles and LAUSD’s three grenade launchers.

Officials said only rubber bullets would be launched from those devices. But civilian concerns over disproportionate force have mounted from Los Angeles to Davis and beyond, especially in the wake of the high-profile police response to recent unrest in Ferguson, Mo. Importantly, conservative, libertarian and liberal interests alike have begun to stake out a rough consensus on the issue. For Californians on the left, police militarization has been tied to social and criminal justice issues of central concern. For libertarians, the controversy has fallen squarely under the rubric of civil liberties and state coercion. And for conservatives, a deeply dispiriting sense has set in that the good old days of friendly neighborhood cops have given way to a time when police look too much like strike teams sent to fight the world’s worst terrorists.

Whatever the bargains law enforcement can find on army-grade gear, public opinion may have already turned against the deals.

A protracted conflict

Changing sentiments, however, haven’t changed more than a handful of notable police purchases. Last month, the city of San Jose had to apologize after its under-the-radar acquisition of a drone. But the vehicle has remained in city possession, and residents’ opinions have remained mixed.

In Davis, meanwhile, the City Council has required police to return the $700,000 armored vehicle to the Department of Defense, sparking an outcry from law enforcement themselves. “We have a genuine and job-specific need for the types of equipment that most people wish that they wouldn’t have in their communities,” warned Davis Police Chief Landy Black.