Last year, fueled by the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man, Stephon Clark, in Sacramento, civil rights groups and state legislators got closer than they ever had to bringing a landmark use-of-force reform bill to the governor’s desk.
This year they are trying again, with renewed momentum and confidence that they can push the legislation through. But police advocates, concerned about the threat posed by the legislation, which is aimed at raising standards for the use of deadly force and making it easier to punish cops who don’t meet that standard, have banded together to ensure they’re not caught off guard, as they were last year.
The 2018 reform bill, spearheaded by San Diego Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, stalled in the state Senate before it could reach a full vote in the Capitol. It has been revived for the current legislative year as Assembly Bill 392.
Police unions and lobbying groups, who made a late-breaking push last fall to assail the proposed reforms, are backing a competing piece of legislation, Senate Bill 230, sponsored by Salinas-based state Sen. Anna Caballero. That bill focuses on increasing force training for police officers and removes the criminal liability of police officers from the equation.
The police groups have also formed the nonprofit Protect California, an organization that besides promoting the Caballero bill, aims to address issues that often dovetail with deadly police force, including de-escalating police confrontations and responding to mental-health crises. Multiple studies, including a civil grand jury report in Santa Clara County last year, have shown that mental illness factors into nearly half of officer-involved shootings in the state.
“Public safety professionals believe more can be done to improve outcomes between police officers and the residents we serve,” said San Jose Police Officers’ Association President Paul Kelly in a statement. “Protect California will focus on pulling every lever available to advocate for policies, programs and laws that make us all safer.”
The San Jose union is among the inaugural members of Protect California, which includes police unions in Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Bernardino, as well as the California Highway Patrol and the influential Peace Officers Research Association of California. The architects of the group don’t skirt the fact that Weber’s bill, and how close it came to passing last year, prompted the creation of the lobbying arm.
“Where we separated from Dr. Weber, is that she wanted to criminalize those split-second decisions” about whether to use lethal force, said Robert Harris, a board member of the Los Angeles Police Protective League. “We wanted more than a bill, we wanted to have a plan to impact safety in our communities that was grounded in data and fact based.”
Harris cited a poll, commissioned by the new police group and conducted by Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz and Associates, that surveyed 800 registered voters in California and found that 71 percent of them preferred that authorities focus on addressing the root causes of crime rather than prosecuting police officers.
Reform advocates question whether that’s a fair characterization of the alternatives, and argue that the Weber bill, through its higher accountability standards, will compel the training and other improvements proposed by the competing Caballero bill. They cite Seattle and Cleveland as examples of large cities that tightened use-of-force standards and saw a reduction in overall incidents involving police force.
Among the biggest points of contention over Weber’s bill involves raising the deadly force standard from “reasonable” to “necessary,” and requiring officers to exhaust other alternatives before turning to potentially lethal tactics. Critics have called it a moving target that could unfairly expose officers to prosecution. Both sides expect the issue to be sorted out in the courts if the bill were to be instituted.
“Raising the standard from reasonable to necessary is going to change training policies,” said Joe Kocurek, Weber’s communications director. “What we’re saying is, in order for training to be effective, you have to have certain expectations for conduct on the ground.”
On Saturday, a day after Kocurek spoke with this news organization, the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office announced it will not charge the two officers who fatally shot Clark in a backyard in March 2018, a shooting that further galvanized national and state police accountability movements.
“The unnecessary deaths of civilians, including those who are unarmed, has been a problem for a very long time,” Kocurek said. “They’ve had their chance to solve it but haven’t. Now they want us to trust them to solve it.”
He added: “We’ve chosen this policy because it has been proven to save lives.”
Grant Ward, president of the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Employees Benefit Association, said the forces behind Weber’s bill are widening the gap between police and the communities they are tasked with protecting. He singled out among those forces organizations like the ACLU.
“It’s a recipe for disaster, designed to make it easier to capitalize on tragedies and sue cities and counties,” Ward said. “It does nothing to address the root causes, it’s just punitive. We’re fighting their false narrative, and trying to be proactive. We want our communities to be successful.”
Raj Jayadev, director of Silicon Valley De-Bug, which helped author multiple bills in last year’s criminal-justice reform wave in the Legislature, rejected the notion of police trying to pin community trust issues on groups like his.
“Let me tell you what is divisive,” Jayadev said. “Officers killing unarmed people of color then returning back to work after having paid leave, not having to face any measure of accountability in its wake, and leaving a community in shambles.”
“What it feels like, I think they could concede, is that this is a fork in the road moment for California,” he added. “We can make a historic shift in a long trend and pattern, and have political momentum behind ending police violence.”