AB931 would limit the use of force to strictly a last resort, when officers have no other option to protect themselves or civilians.

Currently, police officers may use deadly force if their actions “are ‘objectively reasonable’ in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them.” This standard was established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989 in Graham v. Connor.

The bill was spurred by a spate of civilian deaths, particularly minorities, at the hands of police, with the killing of an unarmed Stephon Clark by Sacramento police officers in March in particular serving as the catalyst for legislative action.

“AB931 is about preventing unnecessary deaths by clarifying police use-of-force,” said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego. “This bill is squarely in line with the best practices recognized by academics and best practices in the field.”

Additionally, Sen. Steve Bradford, D-Gardena, cited the need to protect communities of color.

The ACLU of California praised the development, tweeting, “We need the bill to address the policing crisis that has led to the deaths of far too many people.”

However, law enforcement groups, many of which have opposed the bill since its inception, will likely vigorously fight the bill’s passage. “We agree that more training can result in better outcomes, but there is a fundamental disagreement about raising the standards above what the Supreme Court has said,” one lobbyist for the California Police Chiefs Association told the Sacramento Bee.

AB931’s next test be the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

After years of operating under the radar, the cover has been pulled back on an FBI program, centered around Southern California, to amass iris scan information in a federal database.

“To create that pool of scans, the FBI has struck information-sharing agreements with other agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and local law enforcement departments. California has been most aggressive about collecting scans, but agencies in Texas and Missouri can also add to and search the system,” the Verge reported. “The result amounts to a new national biometric database that stretches the traditional boundaries of a pilot program, while staying just outside the reach of privacy mandates often required for such data-gathering projects.”

“In California, the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino have contributed scans, with the latter’s sheriff’s department harvesting more than 200,000 scans alone,” as Mashable noted. “An average of 189 iris scans were collected every day at the start of 2016.” 

According to the Verge, those scans were collated and sent to the FBI by the California Department of Justice, which signed a memorandum with the Bureau in 2013 that set down the responsibilities of each. “The document says only that the FBI will handle information from the project ‘lawfully,’ while California must ‘comply with its state privacy laws,'” the site noted. “The FBI has said the program is bound by internal information security standards.”

Ready and willing

Southern California law enforcement agencies appeared eager to help spearhead the program, signing up again and again to participate. While California’s effort “was scheduled to run for one year and then be reassessed,” the site added, “it’s been renewed each year since 2013,” with Steve Fischer, Chief of Multimedia Productions at the FBI’s CJIS Division, estimating the so-called pilot program would “continue for 2 to 3 additional years.” 

Treatment of the undertaking as a pilot has made relative sense given its current scope and future aims. “The iris scan program, like the facial scans, is part of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) database,” a system with “a broad purview including employment background checks and identifying unknown corpses as wall as use in criminal, terrorist, and intelligence investigations,” according to Yahoo Tech. Pushing to develop the technology out of “fears of another 9/11-style attack,” IB Times reported, “the FBI signed a $1 billion contract with military behemoth Lockheed Martin to develop and launch the unit.” Details haven’t emerged on how large of a database, or how many years of activity, might have been considered before expanding iris scans nationwide.

Drawing criticism

Predictably, California civil liberties advocates and activists have swiftly lined up against the scheme. “What we’re seeing is how counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics are being codified into everyday policing,”  Stop LAPD Spying founder Hamid Khan told the Times. “In essence, we’re all suspects.” Nicole Ozer, ACLU California’s policy director for technology and civil liberties, told the Verge it was “very troubling” that “these systems have gone forward without any public debate or oversight that we’ve been able to find[.]”

But in Southern California, where San Bernardino was left reeling in the face of one of the nation’s most shocking terror attacks, officials’ relationship with the FBI has grown close. Northern California heavyweight Apple fought the Bureau’s demand to unlock the cellphone belonging to the shooter, raising questions “over whether technology companies’ encryption technologies protect privacy or endanger the public by blocking law enforcement access to information,” the Washington Post recalled. By collecting iris scans on its own, federal law enforcement could help ensure that the information might later be construed as personal data protected by private companies.

But in Oakland, it appears authorities will only release the body-camera videos when they exonerate police, and that the video will be kept from the public and the media in other circumstances on the grounds that it is part of an ongoing investigation. The East Bay Express recently reported on how the Oakland police are dealing with four police killings. In two cases, Police Chief Sean Whent won’t release any body-cam footage. In the other two cases, police wouldn’t release the footage to the public. Instead, on Aug. 19, the Oakland Police Department held a screening for 11 members of the media.

This account is from the East Bay Express:

[The] videos included police body camera footage taken by officers who were chasing Richard Linyard and Nathaniel Wilks (in two separate incidents). On July 19, Linyard was allegedly fleeing the police on foot when he was later found wedged between two buildings. A coroner’s report said Linyard died from injuries he suffered when he was apparently stuck between the buildings.

 

On August 12, Wilks allegedly fled the police in a vehicle and then on foot. Several officers confronted and shot Wilks near the intersection of 27th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.

 

Watson said OPD showed videos to select members of the media in order to dispel inaccurate reports that officers beat Linyard, and claims that Wilks was shot in the back. Both incidents sparked protests. “We held the viewing in the interest of the public, to be able to share information through fair and balanced reporting,” said Watson.

 

Watson, however, said that the video footage will not be released to the broader public, and that OPD believes the California Public Records Act allows the department to withhold the footage because it is evidence in several ongoing investigations.

‘Completely wrong’ to withhold some video

As the Bay Area News Group reported, giving the police the right to pick and choose which videos to release outraged local civil-rights lawyer Jim Chanin. “I think it’s completely wrong to have selective showings of one shooting and not another shooting, depending on how the department feels . … There’s an inference now that if (police) don’t show you a video, there could be something wrong or improper about (another) shooting,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Sacramento, a bill that would establish statewide procedures on access to and use of policy body-camera footage appears to have failed, U-T San Diego columnist Steve Greenhut wrote on Friday.

In April, a comprehensive bill by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, passed its initial committee vote. Per its official description, “Assembly Bill 66 would provide guidelines about when the cameras are to be operated, require notification of those being recorded, and prohibit law-enforcement officers involved in serious use-of-force incidents that result in serious bodily injury or death from viewing the video until they have filed an initial report.” Whent, the Oakland police chief, testified in favor of the bill.

But Weber’s bill was effectively killed within weeks. As Dan Walters wrote in the Sacramento Bee:

Weber’s body camera bill was beaten up in the Assembly Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. Police unions, whose endorsements politicians crave, strongly opposed it as unfair, and the committee insisted that only local authorities decide when cops can see body videos.

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.

In the wake of an appeals court ruling that defended the constitutionality of tickets issued to motorists caught running red lights, Assemblyman Matthew Harper, R-Huntington Beach, introduced Assembly Bill 1160 to turn them off in the Golden State.

Cities have begun moving away from the unpopular devices, blamed for creating more accidents than they prevented. The cameras spread throughout California as an efficient way for municipalities to raise revenue by ticketing violators. But lawsuits and increased costs imposed by camera companies have discouraged their continued use.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Harper noted his concern with the “Big Brother” aspect of the cameras, which enable cities to police violations with automation, humans checking only later.

The California Court of Appeal ruled against three San Bernardino County plaintiffs who had sued Redflex Traffic Systems, a red-light camera company based in Australia, for violating their constitutional rights as applied to confrontation, due process and probable cause. “The court leaned heavily on the state Supreme Court’s California v. Goldsmith decision from last June, a case that upheld the state evidence code that lawmakers re-wrote to declare automated tickets admissible as evidence,” reported theNewspaper.com.

A big bother

Without constitutional recourse to the cameras’ Big Brother problem, Harper played up the prospect of legislative relief by emphasizing a different problem — the sheer bother the cameras impose on Californians.

“These cameras were put in place to reduce accidents, but are doing the exact opposite of what they were intended for,” he said in a statement. “They are causing dangerous accidents, and taxpayers are shouldering the burden of maintaining them.” Calling the devices a failure “on all fronts,” Harper vowed that AB1160 “will end wasteful spending on an ineffective program and will make our roads safer at the same time.”

Conflicting data

Evidence appeared to be mixed, however. In Bakersfield, police told ABC 23, “In the eight locations red light cameras are installed, crashes have significantly decreased and only a small number of secondary crashes, rear collisions, have been noted.” According to Sgt. Joe Grubbs, the cameras have helped significantly reduce so-called “primary” collisions, such as head-on crashes and broadsides, “across the board.”

An engineering study conducted in 2013 showed primary collisions dropping between 46 and 73 percent at the Bakersfield intersections where red-light cameras were installed. As KBAK and KBFX Eyewitness News observed, so-called “secondary” collisions also decreased up to 63.7 percent at six out of eight intersections. “But at the remaining two locations, the number of secondary collisions went up. At Bernard Street and Oswell Street the increase was 84.2 percent, and secondary collisions went up by 15.5 percent at Coffee Road and Truxtun Avenue.”

A tide of disapproval

Despite the uncertainty surrounding just how unsafe red-light cameras may be, municipalities have had other incentives to drop them. Redflex has unsuccessfully tried to get cities like Davis to pay over $1,000 more per camera and per month to “upgrade” the devices. Facing substantial costs and popular dissatisfaction, cities from Berkeley to Whittier simply have dropped them.

For Jay Beeber, the Golden State’s preeminent anti-red-light-camera activist, the trend is clear. “In California there were about 110 red light camera programs at one time or other,” he said. “Since then, 73 jurisdictions have closed, banned cameras, or are about to close their programs. That leaves 39 continuing programs in California.”

The movement away from red-light cameras indicates one area where California Republicans can earn goodwill with Democrats — many of whom have viewed the cameras as part of a virtual racket used by police departments to cash in on hapless residents.

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 move exploits an unusual situation that has developed in Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration. When it comes to criminal justice, Brown’s attention is largely consumed with “realignment” — his effort to satisfy a series of court orders on prison crowding by shifting inmates, costs and responsibilities from the state’s prisons to county jails.

But Attorney General Kamala Harris sees police conduct as central; in her inauguration address, she drew special attention to what she called a statewide “crisis of confidence” in law enforcement, driven by a “string of injustice” running through urban and minority communities.

There have been bumps in the road even for Harris, however. “While Harris’ office recently launched a plan to investigate and improve bias and use-of-force training for law enforcement, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights has criticized her for pushing back against demands for an independent prosecutor to handle cases of police brutality,” ThinkProgress observed. Politically unable to fully rebuke or embrace Brown’s realignment plan, Harris has also struggled to steer clear of the controversy that surrounds it.

But with Harris now a formidable 2016 contender for the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., state legislators face a moment of opportunity, support and attention historically rare for would-be police reformers.

A unified front

With plenty of ideas to go around, Sacramento Democrats are able to push for their own particular proposals, while maintaining a cohesive approach to policy. Assembly Bill 86, drafted by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, takes advantage of Harris’ influence and sympathy. As NBC San Diego reported, the bill “would create a law enforcement panel, likely within the state Attorney General’s office, to study each case of a California police officer fatally shooting someone and write reviews or issue recommendations.”

Other legislators have focused on related pieces of legislation. According to U-T San Diego, Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, D-Pomona, is at work on two key bills.

The first, an early draft of AB69, would mandate police body cameras throughout the state. (Steve Soboroff, president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, has taken an early lead implementing the technology.)

The second, AB71, would expand federal data collection on California crimes. Currently, U-T reports, the Justice Department gathers self-reported data from law enforcement on “civilian deaths in police custody, including race.” AB71 “would expand that data collection to include non-fatal shootings and injuries sustained by police officers.”

At the same time, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, is advancing AB66, designed to create a unified set of standard practices for body camera use in California police departments. Body cams are already in use in Weber’s district. So far, the city has already introduced 300 cameras into central and southeastern San Diego.

Up for grabs

For Republicans, the political landscape surrounding policing offers risks and opportunities. In California, the GOP’s overarching position could well be up for grabs.

Nationally, Republicans have begun to adopt a more clement attitude, thanks in part to striking figures that show crime at significant lows. As Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told The New York Times, “There are a lot of ideas — prison reform, policing, sentencing — being discussed now that wouldn’t be if we hadn’t had this drop in the crime statistics.”

The Senate’s leading unorthodox Republicans, such as Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., carry considerable favor among California’s libertarians and libertarian-leaning Republicans. Paul is considered a contender for the GOP nomination for president in 2016.

In the absence of a strong stance from within the state, Lee and Paul’s support for prison reform could supply California Republicans with adequate political cover to advance some proposals of their own.

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.