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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

A pressure cooker

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

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

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

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

Mainstreaming a worldview

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

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

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

Despite the polarized political atmosphere that has surrounded the shooting, everything about the incident has seemed to complicate a clear judgment. On the one hand, the events leading up to and including the killing have been caught on videotape from multiple security sources. On the other, the video evidence failed to exonerate or condemn the officers involved.

Although five shots can be heard — suggesting potentially excessive force was used on the man police seemed to overpower — one officer can also be heard warning that the suspect had gained control of his gun.

That was just the beginning of the strange twists emerging in the case. The deceased was known on the street as a former mental health patient named Africa. But Africa had a considerably more complex past.

In the late 1990s, CBS reported, the man successfully perpetrated an identity theft of a French citizen named Charley Saturmin Robinet, according to Axel Cruau, France’s consul general in Los Angeles. Using the name to secure a French passport, he traveled to the United States in ostensible pursuit of an acting career.

Instead of notoriety on stage or screen, however, the man eventually known as Africa ended up on the wrong end of a botched bank robbery in Thousand Oaks. Along with two others, he was arrested — a development that initially triggered a typical level of assistance from the French Consulate.

When it emerged that Africa was not in fact Robinet — or even French — he wound up in the mental health unit of a federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota. According to federal officials, CBS noted, “Medical staff determined he was suffering from ‘a mental disease or defect’ that required treatment in a psychiatric hospital.”

Remarkably, Africa’s nationality has still not been established, although on the street he was understood to call Cameroon his home country. As ABC News reported, court documents show he was released on May 12 of last year, having spent 14 years in prison. How he wound up on Skid Row remained unclear.

Messy fault lines

In light of the bizarre circumstances surrounding the case, the political controversy it created has taken on a complex and uncertain cast. For one thing, Africa had established a pattern of conflict with the LAPD.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, cops routinely struggled to make him comply with a court agreement that requires street tents to be taken down by 6 a.m. For another, two of the officers involved in Africa’s killing were equipped with bodycams — yielding footage the department claims will help exonerate them.

What’s more, Police Chief Charlie Beck underscored that the implicated cops had gone through the city’s most rigorous and carefully targeted program concerning altercations with the mentally ill and homeless.

According to the Times:

“Beck said Monday that the officers involved in the shooting were part of the Safer Cities Initiative — an LAPD task force specifically focused on skid row — and were ‘specially trained in dealing with homeless people and mental health issues.’ Some of the officers involved had undergone the department’s ‘most extensive mental illness training,’ which he described as a 36-hour course.”

As a result, Africa’s shooting fit poorly into the pattern of LAPD scandals that has attracted such negative press and public opinion in recent years. In the wake of the 1999 Rampart corruption ordeal, federal oversight of the force was imposed by “consent decree” and lifted only in 2013.

In August of last year, cops came under intense scrutiny for the back-to-back deaths of Omar Abrego and Ezell Ford, an unarmed mentally ill man.

Although a groundswell of public opinion has yet to form around Africa’s case one way or the other, a small but seething crowd of protestors descended on Tuesday’s weekly meeting of the Police Commission. Steve Diaz, one organizer in attendance, accused the Safer Cities Initiative of putting Skid Row under “police occupation” in order to hasten so-called gentrification around the neighborhood.