Assembly Bill 284 had little chance of passage because it dealt with an actual problem and was getting pushback from some muscular lobbies.
There are two rules of thumb to keep in mind when following the California legislature.
First, lawmakers love to prattle about pie-in-the-sky issues, such as halting global warming, but steadfastly avoid tackling nuts-and-bolts issues (pension liabilities, infrastructure repairs) that cry out for attention but run up against powerful special-interest groups.
Second, you always know it’s a cop-out when legislators promise to “study” something.
The gutting of a police-reform bill last week combined both of those realities. Assembly Bill 284 had little chance of passage because it dealt with an actual problem and was getting pushback from some muscular lobbies. Instead of killing the measure and getting a bad rap among their minority constituents, legislators turned it into a meaningless study bill.
The bill was introduced by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento) following an incident captured on a disturbing video. Last July, Sacramento police tried to run over a knife-wielding, mentally ill man with their police cruiser, then fired 18 shots and killed him. The city in February settled a lawsuit with the man’s family for $719,000, but the district attorney cleared the officers of wrongdoing. Police said the man was a danger to the neighborhood.
Obviously, several “use of force” incidents have been in the news, so the Sacramento situation wasn’t unusual. What was unusual is that a legislator proposed something substantive in response. The legislation would have created statewide teams to investigate officer-involved shootings. This would provide outside involvement in the currently incestuous oversight system. The revised bill now merely requires the state Department of Justice to produce a report of times officers shoot people or when people shoot them.
Let’s deal with a few little-discussed realities. No matter how egregious any killing appears, officers are cleared by their own departments and district attorneys, who work closely with the same police departments they oversee. In the rare instance they do prosecute an officer, a jury will side with the cop. Police unions shield even the worst officers, who always claim their lives were in danger. I’ve covered a number of these cases, and the result is usually the same.
Here are some more realities. Liberals see these police killings through an entirely racial lens. There is, of course, a strong racial element to many of them, but most of the ones I’ve covered have had white people as the victims. It’s more a policing problem that centers on an insular paramilitary culture that downplays the value of “civilian” lives.
For the full article visit: http://reason.com/archives/2017/07/21/gutting-of-oversight-bill-puts-kibosh-on