Calling itself the California Public Safety Partnership, the group includes Assemblyman Jim Cooper, D-Elk Grove, and Sacramento County District Attorney Anne-Marie Schubert. “These reforms make sure that truly violent criminals stay in jail and don’t get out early,” Schubert told the L.A. Times.

California voters in recent years have rolled back some of the state’s tougher criminal justice laws.

In 2014, Proposition 47 downgraded various nonviolent crimes – such as certain drug offenses and property crimes – from felonies to misdemeanors. The money saved was allocated to crime-prevention programs such as mental health and truancy prevention.

Proposition 57, passed in 2016, allowed those convicted of nonviolent felonies to apply for early parole, in addition to allowing certain inmates to earn credits toward release by participating in rehabilitation programs. These inmates still must go before the parole board.

Both ballot measures passed by comfortable margins.

The proposed initiative would expand the collection of DNA samples to seven misdemeanors that were felonies prior to Prop. 47’s implementation. Currently, DNA is collected only for felonies.

The initiative also makes serial theft – stealing more than $250 or the equivalent after two previous similar convictions – a felony. Under Prop. 47, the current threshold for felonies in cases of theft is $950.

While the measure’s sponsors cite “serious problems being caused by recent criminal justice reforms,” it’s unclear the effect Props. 47 and 57 have had on crime. Violent crime rates for 2016 are up 4.1 percent from 2015, but they are still well below the peak of violent crime rates in 1992, according to the 2016 California Crime Reports. Meanwhile, property crime was down 2.9 percent

The ballot measure’s proponents must obtain 365,880 signatures by the end of April 2018 to qualify for the November 2018 ballot.

The main policy is known as realignment. Pushed through by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2011, the two new laws allow “non-violent, non-serious and non-sex offenders to serve their sentence in county jails instead of state prisons,” according to an explanation from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The department says that no state prisoners had their time reduced and that the laws did not provide any early releases.

The second policy is Proposition 47, a statewide initiative that passed 60 percent to 40 percent in November 2014. As Ballotpedia explains, the initiative “classified ‘non-serious, nonviolent crimes’ as misdemeanors instead of felonies unless the defendant has prior convictions for murder, rape, certain sex offenses or certain gun crimes.” It also permitted resentencing “for those currently serving a prison sentence for any of the offenses that the initiative reduces to misdemeanors.” That measure did therefore lead to early releases.

The state passed a variety of other sentencing-reform measures beginning in 2010. For instance, California had long taken a tough-on-crime approach, including passage of the nation’s toughest “three strikes and you’re out” laws in 1994, in the midst of frighteningly high crime rates. But even that signature crime-fighting law was revised, as voters passed, 70 percent to 30 percent, a 2012 statewide initiative that required a life sentence only if the third strike were serious or violent.

The new laws reduced prison overcrowding, although they didn’t actually reduce the amount of tax dollars spent on the prison system. The big question: What have they done to crime rates? A spike in some crimes over that period has led to a vociferous debate, with Republicans and some moderate Democrats fanning fears of a crime wave. One Republican gubernatorial candidate, Abel Maldonado, ran for governor in 2014 on an anti-crime platform, but didn’t gain traction.

Currently, Democratic Assemblyman Jim Cooper, a former sheriff’s captain from Elk Grove, is leading efforts qualify a ballot measure for the 2018 general election that would roll back much of Proposition 47. It also would roll back the loosened parole requirements in Proposition 57, which passed on the 2016 statewide ballot, and expand the list of crimes that requires collection of the perpetrator’s DNA, according to an Associated Press report.

Such pushback is due in large part to fears of growing crime rates. “Since the passage of Proposition 47 by voters in 2014 and the signing of AB109 in 2011, violent crime has been on the rise in California, up 12 percent in 2015 statewide according to the FBI,” according to a statement in March by Sen. Jeff Stone, R-Riverside County. Politifact double-checked his claim and found a one-year violent crime increase (from 2014 to 2015) of 8.4 percent.

That’s certainly enough to spark concern, but it’s hard to assess crime data based on short periods of time – and even harder to trace crime increases or decreases to any particular policy cause. New research from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice looked at the entire 2010-2016 period of criminal-justice policy reform and found some mixed results. Overall, however, the group explains that the state’s crime rate was “stable” over that time.

“Urban crime rates in California declined precipitously through the 1990s and 2000s,” wrote author Mike Males. “Since 2010, crime in California has stabilized, hovering near historically low levels.” Males compared the first six months of 2016 (the latest reporting period) with the first six months of 2010 and found that “total crime rates experienced no net change, while property crime declined by 1 percent and violent crime increased by 3 percent.”

National crime data show a small overall uptick nationwide, which might suggest that something other than California-only realignment and sentencing reform policies were at work here. Crime data often is affected more by local factors, and indeed the study finds that “crime rates at the local level have varied considerably.” For instance, crime rates shot up 18 percent in Downey, but dropped an astounding 29 percent in Santa Clara.

Regarding the big cities, the report found increased violent crime rates in Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Jose – but lower violent crime rates in Oakland, Sacramento, San Diego and San Francisco. Likewise, some big cities (Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Diego) faced rising property crimes, but others (Fresno, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Jose) saw falling rates of property crime from 2010 to 2016.

The report found “no visible change” due to realignment and called for “more data” before “drawing conclusions about Prop. 47’s effect on crime.” Other studies from last year echo these conclusions. These numbers, based on the newest FBI statistics, suggest that current concerns about a justice-reform-driven crime wave are overblown.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Michael Christopher Mejia, 26, had been arrested five times in the last year before he killed veteran officer Keith Boyer during the scene of an accident on February 20. Mejia was under the supervision of a probation officer, benefiting from the provisions under AB109, the bill enacting so-called “realignment” by shifting prisoners from state prisons to local jails, or releasing them entirely under supervision to deal with overcrowding.

Since its enactment, law enforcement agencies and politicians have warned it poses a threat to public safety, with Southern California police chiefs calling it “dangerous public policy” back in 2013.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors cited AB109, as well as Propositions 47 and 57, for creating “additional and considerable” safety threats to police departments.

“We need to wake up. Enough is enough. You’re passing these propositions, you’re creating these laws. … It’s not good for our community (and) it’s not good for our officers,” Whittier police chief Jeff Piper told the media in an emotionally charged press conference.

During a time of heightened scrutiny of law enforcement nationwide, in part due to the perceived anti-cop rhetoric from groups like Black Lives Matter, California is becoming more and more of a flashpoint in the debate over how to confront the issue of violent crime and police engagement.

“As soon as realignment became a reality here in California, we knew as police chiefs that it was going to be a big problem,” said Santa Ana Police Chief Carlos Rojas.

However, UC Irvine criminologist Charis Kubrin says the research indicates that AB109 isn’t responsible for an increase in violent criminal activity in the state, declaring that “there is no doubt in my mind that AB109 had zero impact.”

But as The Mercury News notes, few reviews of the law exist because the state did not apportion funds for studying AB109’s effects. Furthermore, four officers killed in Southern California in the last six months were by repeat offenders, including the murders of a Palm Springs officer and an L.A. County Deputy Sheriff, both which made national headlines.

While it appears more inquiry may be needed to understand the full effects of prison reform legislation, cities like Los Angeles are continuing to grapple with an increase in violent crime, with homicides rising for a third year in a row, reversing a decline that began in the 1990s.

Drew Gregory Lynch is a CalWatchdog contributer

@_drewgregory

Some advocates for police reform worry about what a new Trump administration will mean for these discussions given the president-elect’s expectedly different approach toward the matter than President Obama’s Department of Justice. But others argue the election will send reform back to where it really belongs: at the local level.

Two northern California cities, Sacramento and San Francisco, are good examples of the latter. They are currently plowing ahead with major oversight and accountability proposals for their police departments – the result of local policing scandals that have little to do with national political changes. Sacramento takes up the matter at a City Council meeting on Tuesday.

The Sacramento reforms were prompted by a video of two police officers in pursuit of a mentally ill homeless man, Joseph Mann, who was armed with a knife and acting erratically. As the Sacramento Bee reported, the video sequence shows “the officers gunned their vehicle toward Mann, backed up, turned and then drove toward him again, based on dash-cam video released by police. They stopped the car, ran toward Mann on foot and shot him 14 times.” One officer is recorded saying “f— this guy” shortly before they shot him.

The killing raised questions not only about the appropriate use of force in such situations, but about the city’s willingness to provide the public information about what transpired. Top city officials – the police chief, city attorney and city manager – didn’t release the video of the event until after the Bee acquired the footage from a private citizen. The shooting led to community protests and has been a source of strife – and council debate – ever since.

In September, the newspaper’s Editorial Board published this pointed editorial: “The city could have been upfront with Mann’s family about how many times he was shot and how long the investigation into the shooting would take. Instead, his brother, backed by enough activists to fill City Hall, had go before the City Council to beg for information. The city could have been clear about what training officers receive to handle people who are mentally ill. Instead, police still haven’t responded to a Public Records Act request for a copy of the department’s policy.”

Reformers argue that the proposed policy doesn’t go far enough, although backers argue that it is about as far as it can go given state law. Specifically, the measure would transfer power of the civilian oversight committee from the city manager’s office to the mayor and City Council – thus providing a more independent level of oversight given that the city manager also oversees the police department. Council members are at least beholden to voters.

The city’s proposal also does the following: “This resolution requires the city manager to ensure that all police officers of the Sacramento Police Department abide by council specified guidelines with regards to use of force. Key components of the resolution include the timely release of video after an officer involved incident occurs and the immediate notification of family members after an officer involved shooting.” That attempts to deal with the public-records issue.

Civilian-oversight commissions are still limited by the state Supreme Court’s Copley decision. In that 2006 case, the San Diego Union-Tribune tried to gain access to a disciplinary hearing regarding a deputy sheriff who was appealing his termination. As the newspaper reported, “The court ruled that police disciplinary hearings are closed — and the public has no right to learn about allegations of police misconduct, even when they are aired in a civil service commission.” Legislative efforts to roll back parts of the decision have repeatedly been stymied by police union lobbying.

In San Francisco, officials have been reacting to controversy following three officer-involved shootings and a scandal involving racist text messages that were allegedly sent by police officers. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported in April, “The messages are loaded with slurs and ugly stereotypes, and include one from an officer responding to a photo of a blackened Thanksgiving turkey. ‘Is that a Ferguson turkey?’ the officer asks, referring to the city in Missouri that saw widespread protests after police fatally shot an unarmed African American man in 2014.”

National politics plays a bigger role in the San Francisco case. That’s because the federal Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services department published a study last month looking at San Francisco’s police department. The mayor and former police chief had asked the department to review police practices following these scandals.

As the report’s summary explained, “Although the COPS Office found a department that is committed to making changes and working with the community, it also found a department with outdated use of force policies that fail the officers and the community and inadequate data collection that prevents leadership from understanding officer activities and ensure organizational accountability. The department lacked accountability measures to ensure that the department is being open and transparent while holding officers accountable.”

San Francisco officials have vowed to implement the 479 recommendations made in the Justice Department report. “We will continue to implement the recommendations for reform which will be built on the most current policing policies and practices, fostering an environment of trust and strong relationships with our communities,” said acting Police Chief Toney Chaplin.

In Sacramento, Mayor-elect Darrell Steinberg, who is inaugurated on Dec. 13, told the Bee “the public certainly has a right to know whether a particular officer who has been accused of misconduct continues to serve in the role of police officer. … There ought to be a clear presumption of openness and the burden ought to be on the city attorney and police to demonstrate in a compelling way why anything is not public.” There’s concern that a federal lawsuit by Mann’s relatives will allow the city to shut down public access to information about the shooting.

This much is clear: Whatever changes a new administration makes at the Department of Justice, local officials throughout California are on the front lines of the police-reform movement. 

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Heightening the stakes in the criminal justice debate roiling the country at large, Gov. Jerry Brown could soon greenlight a law that would allow some state felons to vote from jail.

California has wound up in the middle of the pack on state laws around criminals and voting rights. “Two states, Maine and Vermont, allow felons to vote while behind bars,” KTVU noted, while “14 states restore voting rights automatically when a person is released from prison. 4 states, including California, restore voting rights after completion of parole.” The new rule, if Brown were to sign AB2466, carves out an exception for felons shifted out of state prisons due to realignment.

Constitutional claims

For that reason, advocates of the bill have characterized it as more of a formality than an overhaul of the state’s criminal law. In 2011, the Criminal Justice Realignment Act “created new sentencing categories for low-level, nonviolent offenders to remedy unconstitutionally overcrowded state prisons,” the NAACP’s Janai Nelson noted in the Los Angeles Times. “Instead of time in state prison, minor felony convictions now result in a term in the county jail followed by release under what’s known as mandatory or community supervision.” Given the opportunity to rule on how that changed status squares with voting laws, “Alameda County Superior Court already has held that people subject to this new form of mandatory or community supervision are not ‘on parole’ and therefore retain their right to vote,” Nelson added, claiming AB2466 would simply “codify that ruling” and eliminate any “ambiguity in how a felony conviction affects voter eligibility” in California. 

But critics have countered that the parole language is not as relevant to a proper interpretation of standing law as other elements of voters’ 1976 addition to the state constitution. “The Legislature shall prohibit improper practices that affect elections and shall provide for the disqualification of electors while mentally incompetent or imprisoned or on parole for the conviction of a felony,” that language ran in full. Although supporters of AB2466 “contend that the word ‘imprisoned’ in the California Constitution refers to a state prison, but not a county jail,” the looser interpretation AB2466 embraces “would create an odd circumstance in which inmates out of prison on parole are prohibited from voting, but felons behind bars in county jails could vote” — a view held by the state Sheriffs’ Association, as legislative director Cory Salzillo suggested to the Daily Signal. Given the low level of the judiciary ruling used as a baseline by AB2466, that could invite further litigation that would effectively freeze or scuttle the legislation before it is implemented. 

Signaling and consequences

For the bill’s supporters, that risk appeared to be one worth taking. “I wrote AB2466 because I want to send a message to the nation that California will not stand for discrimination in voting,” Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, said in a statement, indicating a preference to pass legislation now and consider later whether it squares legitimately with the state Constitution. Weber has also advanced a bill that would add a five year period of eligibility for nonviolent felons petitioning a sentencing reduction in the wake of Proposition 47, which changed their crimes to misdemeanors. “But issues surrounding Proposition 47 generate significant controversy” as well, the Los Angeles Times recently observed. “The California Police Chiefs Assn. has blamed the initiative for a recent increase in property crimes across the state.”

In a final wrinkle fueling concern around the vote-from-jail law, impacted felons would face a logical but potentially problematic geographic restriction on their vote. “Under AB2466, these inmates would vote in the district where they are incarcerated,” noted state Sen. Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, in the Orange County Register. “For example, an inmate whose home residence is in San Clemente would be able to vote for local races affecting Santa Ana, since that is where Orange County’s Central Jail is located.” 

Asset forfeiture is the practice by which police agencies grab the assets – cash, cars, boats, homes – of suspected criminals. Designed originally to fight drug kingpins, asset forfeiture has morphed into a means by which agencies bolster their budgets. The overwhelming percentage of forfeiture cases involve people who have not been convicted or even accused of a crime.

In one legal case, an agency took away a person’s car because it was used in the commission of a crime, even though the owner wasn’t involved in the crime.

Senate Bill 443 by Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, was designed to stop the types of abuses mentioned above, without hindering the ability of police agencies to grab the illicit proceeds of drug dealers. It mainly requires police to gain a conviction before taking a person’s property. The bill was moving ahead with strong bipartisan support last year, but then law-enforcement lobbyists derailed it the week before a final Assembly vote. They argued primarily that the reforms would cost their agencies a significant amount of money that’s used for crime fighting and that passage of the reform would stifle their ability to target drug kingpins.

Mitchell revived the bill this year and recently hammered out a compromise. The California Police Chiefs Association and other law-enforcement groups dropped their opposition. In a statement, the chiefs’ association lauded “a compromise that enhances safeguards on Californians’ rights, while ensuring law enforcement has the tools necessary to combat the gangs and drug traffickers damaging our communities.” Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union of California seemed equally pleased with the compromise.

MORE ON THE ISSUE:

Diverse coalition of supporters

Broad overview of asset forfeiture

Legislative compromise on the issue

California actually imposes some of the toughest restrictions on asset forfeiture in the nation. Among other restrictions, the law requires a conviction, for instance, for forfeiture when the value of the property is under $25,000. But problems remain because state and local agencies circumvent the state’s law by partnering with federal agencies under a program known as “equitable sharing.” The partnership lets them operate under looser federal standards – and then the locals split the forfeiture proceeds with the federal agencies.

The bill – in its original and amended form – limits the ability of California agencies to do an end run around state law. “The bill would prohibit state or local law enforcement agencies from transferring seized property to a federal agency seeking adoption by the federal agency of the seized property,” according to SB443’s official summary. “The bill would further prohibit state or local agencies from receiving an equitable share from a federal agency of specified seized property if a conviction for the underlying offenses is not obtained … .” The local and state agencies could still participate in joint projects with the federal government and could still receive proceeds – but only if they first secured a criminal conviction in the underlying case.

Under the compromise, however, state officials would not need a conviction to seize “cash or negotiable instruments” above $40,000, whereas the original bill would have required a conviction for all cash seizures. Eighty percent of cash seizures are for less than $40,000, so the compromise protects the vast majority of people who have their cash seized. The average seizure in California is slightly above $5,000. Police agencies say the larger cash amounts usually are the result of drug deals, so the agreement makes sense to both sides. Furthermore, the bill still requires a conviction for the taking of property valued at more than $40,000, such as houses or cars.

That latter point is significant. In one highly publicized case in Anaheim, officials tried to take a commercial building valued at $1.5 million from a couple after one of its tenants was accused of selling $37 in marijuana. The authorities dropped that forfeiture case amid bad publicity, but SB443 is designed to halt those types of takings – where, say, a valuable property is seized simply because a drug crime might have been committed on the premises. The legislation also requires additional reporting from agencies that use the forfeiture process.

The goal is to stop what critics refer to as “policing for profit.” A study from the Drug Policy Alliance reported that some cities “were found to be prioritizing asset forfeiture over general public safety concerns, like response times and sufficient patrol officers.” The report referred to “multiple instances of cash grabs by law enforcement being incentivized over deterring drug sales, wherein police wait until a drug sale concludes and then seize the cash proceeds of the sale rather than the drugs, as drugs must be destroyed and are of no monetary value to law enforcement.”

As Reason’s Scott Shackford pointed out, “As California cities dealt with drops in revenue during the recession over the past decade … participation in the federal program skyrocketed.” But reformers say law enforcement priorities should be shaped by public-safety concerns rather than monetary goals.

Presumably, the final deal will still let agencies grab the dollars of real drug kingpins, while leaving the rest of our property alone – or at least requiring that residents are convicted of wrongdoing before losing it. Both sides believe the right balance has been struck. We’ll see if that’s enough to move the bill through the rest of the legislative process and secure the governor’s signature, but this was a major victory reformers.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. He is based in Sacramento. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

“Parole reform” ballot measure would reduce penalties for sex crimes

Proposition 57 — the newly numbered November “parole reform” ballot measure championed by Gov. Jerry Brown — has already proven controversial…

But according to the California District Attorneys Association, the list of “nonviolent felonies” touted by Brown and accepted by (Attorney General Kamala Harris) include crimes of sexual violence — specifically the ones committed by then-Stanford athlete Brock Turner when he sexually violated a passed-out fellow student in January 2015. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Victor Davis Hanson, with Stanford’s Hoover Institution, wrote a searing column in The Washington Times — a takedown of California policy making that describes two Californias. Here are some highlights:
  • “One is an elite, out-of-touch caste along the fashionable Pacific Ocean corridor that runs the state and has the money to escape the real-life consequences of its own unworkable agendas.”
  • “The other is a huge underclass in central, rural and foothill California that cannot flee to the coast and suffers the bulk of the fallout from Byzantine state regulations, poor schools and the failure to assimilate recent immigrants from some of the poorest areas in the world.”
  • “If Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg wants to continue lecturing Californians about their xenophobia, he at least should stop turning his estates into sanctuaries with walls and security patrols.”
  • “And if faculty economists at the University of California at Berkeley keep hectoring the state about fixing income inequality, they might first acknowledge that the state pays them more than $300,000 per year — putting them among the top 2 percent of the university’s salaried employees.”
  • Here’s the full column. 
• California’s pension fund takes a larger share of tax revenue than the national state average, but it’s unclear why, writes Capitol Weekly. 
• Eight things to know about Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez’s 20-year career in Congress, by the Los Angeles Times.
• And here’s eight highlights from the career of her opponent, Attorney General Kamala Harris.
• “The California Water Resources Control Board says the 28 percent May water conservation rate, compared to May 2013, was ‘phenomenal,'” writes Capital Public Radio. 

Legislature:

• Gone ’til August.

Gov. Brown:

• On vacation.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @lobbyists4good @lizettemata

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.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @joshrogin @latinostrategy

As election day nears, California’s likely vote on recreational pot has drawn policymakers, politicians and law enforcement into an uncertain but probably decisive debate. 

While many Democrats have generally come to view recreational marijuana as an inevitability in the Golden State, Republicans have managed to hold the line of official opposition. As the Sacramento Bee reported, GOP members recently voted at their weekend convention against supporting recreational pot. But some traditional Republican allies have begun to give way. Law enforcement officials have now split on the issue; while many remain convinced that legalizing the drug would complicate their work and create more opportunities for crime, others, as the Los Angeles Times reported, have embraced the notion that reform is needed.

Dividing police

Ventura Police Chief Ken Corney, president of the California Police Chiefs Association, has gone on record capturing cops’ fears that unexpected challenges presented by legalization in Colorado could put California in a painful situation. According to Corney, “extremely potent marijuana is being sold in Colorado that he fears will lead to high addiction rates and high incidents of psychosis,” the Times reported separately.

As the paper also noted, former LAPD deputy chief Steve Downing recently claimed that “continued criminalization benefits the cartels, street gangs — they are the ones regulating it now. When prohibition on alcohol ended it killed off the businesses of men like Al Capone. The same will happen here.”

Downing made his remarks at an event with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has spearheaded support for the ballot initiative that would legalize recreational pot. Newsom, laboring to unite skittish Democrats behind the measure, framed the move as a mature reaction to the failure of the War on Drugs. At the big roll-out for the initiative’s campaign, as the Sacramento Bee reported, Newsom was joined by Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, one of California’s leading Republican figures, who made the civil libertarian case for legal pot. “We got a criminal justice system spending billions of dollars,” he argued, “to try to take care of someone who wants to smoke weed in his backyard.” In a sign of how tenuous Republican opposition to legal pot may become, Rohrabacher went so far as to invoke Ronald Reagan’s call to destroy the Berlin Wall, asking Californians to “join in tearing down this wall” of prohibition. 

The church factor

Yet another source of potential opposition, however, has become a target for pro-legalization forces. “There’s an even bigger wall that supporters of legalization need to scale,” as the San Francisco Chronicle observed. “It’s the wall surrounding churches in many African American and Latino communities. Getting over that wall will be one of the keys to winning the legalization campaign being steered by a combination of political pros and longtime advocates.”

“Six years ago, when California NAACP Chairwoman Alice Huffman was one of the few black leaders to support the failed Proposition 19 legalization measure, she couldn’t even get inside African American churches to talk about the issue. A group of black leaders led by a Sacramento pastor called for her ouster, as they wondered why ‘would the state NAACP advocate for blacks to stay high?’ Their opposition closed many church doors to Huffman and other legalization advocates.”

Planning ahead

Betting that voters will side with the drug, Sacramento has wasted no time in getting started on legislation that would closely regulate some effects of recreational marijuana on everyday life. At least four bills on lawmakers’ desks intervene at the intersection of pot and economics. “Assembly Bill 821 will allow dispensaries to pay their sales taxes in cash,” while “AB1575 makes the foul-sounding Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act (MMRSA) into the more neutral Medical Cannabis Regulation and Safety Act (MCRSA), and calls for other changes to facilitate pot banking, like protection from criminal liability,” according to East Bay Express. “AB2243 is a tax on medical pot growers of $9.25 per ounce for lowers, $2.75 for leaves, $1.25 per immature plant,” the paper added. “AB2385 smooths the way for Los Angeles dispensaries to get state permits.”

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.