Against a national backdrop of discord over police killings of black men and deadly anti-police violence, state lawmakers who back law enforcement conduct and transparency reforms are making little progress in Sacramento.

Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, introduced Senate Bill 1286 to initial success. The measure would have classified internal reports that confirmed serious misconduct by law enforcement officers as public records to be made available upon request. In April, the bill won approval in the Senate Public Safety Committee on a 5-1 vote, leading reform advocates to hope the 2016 legislative session wouldn’t be  as disappointing as the 2015 session.

But the measure has yet to receive a vote or any discussion in the Senate Appropriations Committee, effectively killing it from further consideration this legislative session.

The political influence of police unions was seen as the key factor in the bill’s demise. However, unions also appear to have won a receptive audience from some lawmakers to their complaint that Leno was uninterested in working on less far-reaching reforms they might have been willing to consider. The Los Angeles Police Protective League knocked the termed-out lawmaker for preparing his measure “with no input from law enforcement.”

Law enforcement dead-set against asset seizure changes

Another high-profile reform is back for a second time after being rejected late in the 2015 session: SB443 would change state asset seizure rules to require that an individual be convicted of a crime before his or her assets could be seized by law enforcement. Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, and Assemblyman David Hadley, R-Manhattan Beach, are leading the fight for the measure, saying current rules allow law enforcement to disregard due process in pursuit of the budget-boosting money they can get by cooperating in federal asset-seizure programs intended to thwart drug trafficking. California agencies got $86 million in 2015 from the U.S.

Mitchell and Hadley argue that the profit motive warps law enforcement’s judgment.

“When you get outside of [the Capitol] you get a general consensus that something like this in its broad form should not be happening in the United States,” Hadley told the Los Angeles Times.

Nevertheless, they made a significant change to their bill in response to past criticism: a section was added to allow seizure of assets from suspects who flee or can’t be found.

That hasn’t assuaged the coalition of police and prosecutors who thwarted the previous version of the bill in the Assembly in 2015 after it won easy passage in the Senate. Its strongest voices depict asset-seizure reform as “a message to drug dealers that the cost of doing business has gone down,” in the words of Ventura County District Attorney Gregory Totten.

SB443 was rejected by the Assembly 44-24 last September after passing the Senate 38-1 in June 2015. With 63 Assembly incumbents seeking re-election this November — some in districts that now appear more competitive because the “top two” primary change allows moderate candidates to make the general election ballot — the prospects for the measure don’t appear strong.

In the normal dynamics of government scandal and dysfunction, leaders identify a problem and work to address it, seeking to win media and public approval. But what’s going on in San Francisco reflects the normal dynamics of law-enforcement scandals. Police officers who feel underappreciated — even besieged since the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2014 — push back hard at the idea that they’re doing something fundamentally wrong, even when it comes to police killings of unarmed people.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association denounced Mayor Ed Lee’s decision to ask Suhr to quit. “His retirement under pressure is an extreme loss to the department and the city,” a union statement said. “Chief Suhr, at the core, was and always will be a cop’s cop and dedicated to the men and women who don the uniform every day to serve and protect.”

This attitude doesn’t bode well for interim Police Chief Toney Chaplin, who told reporters that his agenda was “reform, reform, reform” because “the department has to move forward.” 

But despite the praise for Suhr from the police union, the fatal May 18 shooting of the stolen-car suspect was one more example of his lack of control over his department. Suhr has long implored officers not to shoot into fleeing cars. The police union had also criticized his response to the text-message scandal, including his demanding that officers sign a pledge essentially promising to not be bigots.

Union: “Protect due process” of accused officers

There are presently 18 police officers accused in the texting scandal. While police union president Martin Halloran condemned “the appalling racist behavior committed by a handful of officers,” he also said the police union would closely scrutinize the disciplinary process to ensure it “protects the due process rights of the officers.”

Those right are so strong that it is often difficult to fire a police officer in California unless he commits a crime or acts in egregious ways with indisputable evidence. It’s also difficult to even find out about officer misconduct, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April.

Nearly 40 years ago, California took its first steps to shield police misconduct from the public when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law in his first term restricting details of officer personnel files from disclosure. A 2006 California Supreme Court decision went further and extended the law’s protections to cases in which civil service commissions weighed in on officer discipline. Today, almost all details about misconduct — including cases in which police officers were found to have used excessive force, engaged in racial profiling or lied on the job — are kept secret outside of court, administrative or civilian review board proceedings.

And although 23 states keep most public employee personnel records confidential, California is one of just three to provide specific protections for police information, according to a recent investigation by WNYC, a public radio station in New York.

Partly in response to the problems in his home town, Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, introduced SB 1286 that would open up police records in cases of “serious misconduct.” It passed an initial Senate committee vote last month, but then died without a second vote on Friday.

But as Conor Friedersdorf reported last August in The Atlantic, many police reform efforts have been launched in the Golden State only to go nowhere.

What’s next in San Francisco?

Meanwhile, Mayor Lee is facing pressure from the most liberal members of the city’s Board of Supervisors to go after bad cops. Supervisor Jane Kim, a rising star in city politics, has been pushing for change for more than four years and now has more support than ever.

But the police union thinks that Lee has already done too much to address police controversies.

On May 26th Mayor Ed Lee made some very disturbing remarks to the San Francisco Chronicle. These comments were directed at the SFPD Sergeant who was forced to discharge his firearm in the Officer Involved Shooting last week. The Mayor’s remarks were prejudicial and irresponsible. The POA has always responded to misinformed politicians who make such inflammatory statements and the Mayor is no exception.

That’s from Friday post on the police union’s Facebook page.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department continues its investigation of the San Francisco Police Department, launched in February. It’s not clear when the federal probe will conclude. 

Senate Bill 411, introduced by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, protects the practice so long as active bystanders are “not interfering with official duties,” the Los Angeles Times noted.

According to the bill’s language, “the fact that a person takes a photograph or makes an audio or video recording of an executive officer, while the officer is in a public place or the person taking the photograph or making the recording is in a place he or she has the right to be, is not, in and of itself, a violation[.]”

What’s more, Lara’s bill set out that photographing or videotaping police in that matter would not “constitute reasonable suspicion to detain the person or probable cause to arrest the person.”

Setting a trend

Passing 31-3 in the state Senate, SB411 headed to the Assembly, setting up California to become a possible trendsetter in the way citizen monitoring of police could be treated. Currently, no national consensus has formed around the issue, leaving legislative momentum up for grabs at the state level.

Although settled constitutional law has recognized both a right to videotape and a right to prevent interference with policing, widespread departures from that standard have prompted state lawmakers to intervene. In Colorado, for instance, a recent bill “proposed making it a crime for police to stop citizens from filming,” as the Daily Beast observed.

But, across the country, pieces of legislation have run into trouble regardless of which side of the debate they favor. In Connecticut, for instance, a bill permitting “lawsuits against police officers who interfere with those photographing or videotaping them during the performance of their duties was blocked Monday by Republicans in the judiciary committee,” according to the Hartford Courant.

In Texas, meanwhile, a police-friendly “cop-watcher” bill drew fire from legal observers, journalists, gun owners and others:

Dallas-area House representative Jason Villalba introduced HB 2918, which would make it a misdemeanor to photograph police within 25 feet — raising serious concerns that the bill, if passed, would violate the First Amendment and prevent individuals from holding police accountable. For Texans legally carrying a firearm, the buffer zone required would be 100 feet under Villalba’s proposal.

Halting progress

As Calwatchdog.com previously reported, Sacramento has labored to keep up with changing technology, police tactics and public opinion. In January, several Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation around the use of on-cop bodycams. By videotaping situations police entered into, the logic ran, misconduct would decrease at the same time that police gained clear evidence of proper conduct that could help prevent lawsuits or help resolve them to the departments’ benefit.

Attorney General Kamala Harris, for her part, has long considered police abuses to be an important part of her political and legal agenda — a stance that could gain prominence as her bid to replace Sen. Barbara Boxer draws more potent challengers.

Despite widespread support for bodycams among Democrats, along with many libertarians and some Republicans, the policy has attracted its share of problems. In Los Angeles, where Democratic Mayor Eric Garcetti blazed a path toward standardizing the equipment, concern has persisted over the use of cloud storage, as Southern California Public Radio reported:

“Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti will present this month his proposed city budget for the coming year. It’s expected to include money for body cameras for all Los Angeles Police Department officers. But some security analysts argue the LAPD’s plan to store body camera video in the cloud could make the images more vulnerable to attack than if the department placed them on its local servers.”

As yet, the question of cloud storage for recordings of police has not yet threatened to stall the progress of SB411  in Sacramento.

This is no surprise. California was home to the largest protest over police brutality in U.S. history: the 1992 riots after a Simi Valley jury mostly cleared four LAPD officers for their videotaped beating of Rodney King.

But do the Democrats these Californians elect to office ever do anything about it? Do they pass laws cracking down on police misconduct or encouraging outside investigations when there are credible examples of a police department treating minority communities with hostility?

I know of no substantive policies of this kind enacted by the Democrat-dominated Legislature in the past 20 years. After a 2006 court decision (Copley Press v. Superior Court) further insulated law enforcement officers from accountability, activists attempted to get the Legislature to rewrite state law. They got nowhere. The result:

An investigation by ColorLines and the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute has found that the decision, combined with state laws that protect police privacy, has blocked the public from knowing whether local police officers have engaged in misconduct, or a pattern of misconduct, even when such misconduct involves officers inappropriately shooting civilians. …

“Now, you don’t have to worry that your dirty laundry or allegations about your dirty laundry will be on the front page of the newspaper,” the attorney representing the local Deputy Sheriff’s Association, Everett Bobbitt, said at the time. In her dissent, Justice Kathryn Werdegar argued in a dissenting opinion that the ruling “overvalues” police officers’ privacy concerns, and “undervalues the public’s interest in disclosure.”

Combined, Copley and the Bill of Rights mean California has the tightest restrictions on public access to police disciplinary information in the country. “Copley differs greatly from laws in the rest of the country,” said Philip Eure, the head of the District of Columbia’s Office of Police Complaints and a former president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Copley, Eure said, is “rather extreme” in its public records restrictions and has “caused alarm in the oversight community.”

Issue a focus of elected Dems in New York

Now of course not just Democrats but Republicans and independents should be worried about police misconduct or mistreatment of minority groups. But in California, it is Democrats who have the political power and Democrats who have a strong hold on the support of African-Americans and Latinos — the groups most likely to cite systemic police mistreatment.

So why don’t elected Golden State Dems do anything about this issue?

One reason is plain: The huge political power of police unions, which are courted by both parties.

One reason should be plain but isn’t: The assumption of California’s elected Democrats that African-Americans and Latinos will always vote for them, so they don’t have to tend to their concerns about cops.

Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York after a campaign in which he directly addressed the concerns of black voters about police behavior. He may not be following through on his rhetoric, but he at least he brought up the issue. It remains a big issue with the progressive bloc on the New York City Council.

Will an elected California Democrat take the issue and run with it? We shall see.

A lot of oddly gleeful folks treat the verdict as evidence that police did the right thing the night Thomas suffered fatal injuries while being remorselessly tortured by men with badges.

That’s absurd. The frail, mentally ill homeless man wouldn’t be dead if a cop didn’t openly declare he was going to “f—” Thomas up and then follow through on his threat. If the officers had a shred of humanity, Thomas would be alive.

I’m glad to see the L.A. Times report that at least one person in Fullerton understands this:

“Fullerton’s chief of police said he would fight an appeal from one of the officers acquitted in the death of Kelly Thomas to get his job back.

“Jay Cicinelli was fired after being charged by Orange County prosecutors with involuntary manslaughter and excessive force in the 2011 death of the mentally ill homeless man.

“His co-defendant Manuel Ramos, also a former Fullerton police officer, was charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter.

“On Monday a Santa Ana jury found both of them not guilty of all charges.

“Dan Hughes, Fullerton chief of police, said in a statement that his decision to fire Cicinelli is separate and unaffected by the acquittal.”

“’Former Police Officer Jay Cicinelli has alleged that he was wrongfully terminated and has demanded his job back,’ Hughes said. ‘I stand behind the employment decisions I have made.'”

2011 killing produced shameful reaction from many

Why do I express satisfaction that “at least one person in Fullerton” understands what happened to Thomas was horrible?

Because of Steve Greenhut’s U-T San Diego column, which points out that many in Fullerton didn’t get this at all.

“…in July 2011, the Fullerton political establishment rushed to the defense of officers who had beaten a 130-pound homeless schizophrenic named Kelly Thomas. The public saw the published photo of Thomas’ horribly swollen and bruised face, yet the mayor went on TV saying he had seen worse injuries in the Vietnam War and that it was unclear what killed Thomas, who died in a hospital days after the whomping.

“We also learned that police officers confiscated the video camera of a bystander and were allowed to watch the surveillance video of the incident and essentially get their stories straight before giving their statements.”

This is pathetic. As Steve points out, it is also not surprising.

“This one-time idealist wants to believe that in a free society the rulers are held to the same standards as the ruled, that the public wouldn’t stand for the kind of official brutality that takes place in unfree nations and that juries would punish killers even if they wear a uniform.

“Yet over years of writing about policing issues, it’s hard to remain hopeful. No matter how egregious the incident — police gunning down a troubled teen in an empty park, shooting a fleeing suspect in the back, or planting evidence in a car trunk — there’s rarely any punishment.”

Take it away, commenters. Explain to us once again how Kelly Thomas got what he had coming.

Sheesh.

By Chris Reed

A while back, I came upon the amazing stories of Daniel J. Saulmon, a Southern California man who has used video and audio recorders to document vast evidence of police misconduct. Here we go again, with what appears to be the worst abuse of power yet, this time in the L.A. suburb of Hawthorne:

A California man was jailed for four days for attempting to record police officers on a public street.

Daniel J. Saulmon was charged with resisting, delaying and obstructing an officer but the video shows he was standing well out the way of a traffic stop and was only arrested when he failed to produce identification to an approaching officer.

And there is no law in California that requires citizens to produce identification. And even if there was, it would require the officer to have a reasonable suspicion that he was committing a crime.

Will Hawthorne cop Gabriel Lira be thrown off the force?

Nah. This is California. He probably just boosted his chances for a promotion.

By Chris Reed

As the Legislature’s refusal to pass a bill making it easier to fire classroom sexual predators shows, union power isn’t just about protecting jobs, pay and benefits. It’s also about insulating bad apples, even criminals, from the consequences of their behavior. A story in Sunday’s L.A. Times offers a reminder that the champions of this abusive use of political clout are California’s law-enforcement unions.

“A Los Angeles police officer shocked a handcuffed woman with a Taser stun gun while joking with other officers at the scene, according to interviews and law enforcement records, adding to a series of controversial use-of-force incidents at the LAPD. …

“This marks the fourth time in the last few months that cases have come to light in which LAPD officers are accused of using force on suspects who had been restrained.

“In August, a security surveillance camera captured an officer violently throwing a handcuffed woman to the ground with any apparent provocation. Days later, the Times reported on a July incident in which a video camera in a patrol car recorded a female officer stomping her heel onto the genitals of a woman who was being restrained by other officers. That woman died after being forced into the back of a patrol car, although there is no evidence that her death was caused by the officer’s kick. And this month The Times learned about a botched arrest in July, in which a handcuffed man was mistakenly shot by officers after he escaped custody.”

And these are only the cases we hear about. Thanks to a 2006 California Supreme Court decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court, officer misconduct is put behind an official wall. The very next year, a handful of honest lawmakers tried to rectify this dispiriting decision. They failed then and have since pretty much given up.

But thanks to cell phone cameras, we hear more about police misconduct now than at any point ever. Police denials look ridiculous when video shows what officers are doing with their power.

So what do police unions do? They get states to make it illegal to record arrests! The brazenness of this is disgusting.

The twist here is that union workers’ misconduct normally infuriates Republicans. But this GOP ire doesn’t extend to bad cops.