Lake County’s opinions on local/state issues
Check out today’s editorial column, cartoon and columnist perspectives.
The California Department of Justice should always try to live up to its mission of enforcing and applying “all of our laws fairly and impartially.” Yet under the leadership of Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the agency has shown that it doesn’t necessarily enforce “all” the state’s laws — but only those that its officials are partial towards.
The latest example involves Assembly Bill 1506, which was a modest police-accountability law that the Legislature passed in the aftermath of last year’s police-brutality protests. The law requires the AG’s office to handle investigations of some use-of-force incidents by California officers — but only if a local law-enforcement agency requests one.
“Police shouldn’t police themselves, and the current system is fraught with conflicts of interest,” said author Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento. “Since 2015, we have seen over 800 people shot and killed by police in California and just one independent investigation.” McCarty made a valid point: Outside oversight is a needed antidote to the current system, in which a police officer’s colleagues investigate the incident.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure in September and it is now state law. Recently, however, the department complained that it lacks the money it needs to implement it. As the Sacramento Bee reported, DOJ officials said in a letter that they will have difficulty creating “professional teams to perform these new investigative duties” without a $26 million budget allotment.
When it was up for consideration, Becerra had lobbied against the law based on these budget concerns. Since then, Newsom provided $13 million to help DOJ create the new Police Practices Division, even though it’s only likely to review a few cases each year. That’s generous, yet the department is essentially holding the new law hostage unless it gets an even bigger outlay.
Can you imagine what Becerra would say if a business refused to comply with a new state law because it didn’t have enough resources to do so? Even as Becerra was fighting AB 1506, the Bee reported that he was trying to expand his authority into other areas, which undermines his claim that his AB 1506 resistance is about money.
Furthermore, Becerra didn’t raise financial concerns when he spent $41 million suing the Trump administration over federal policies in lawsuits that were more about political posturing than substance. Yet he expects us to believe that can’t find enough money to investigate a few police-shooting cases each year. This has little to do with budgets and everything to do with priorities.
This is nothing new. Becerra is a close ally with the state’s police unions and they are not fond of new accountability laws. In another example, Senate Bill 1421 required agencies to release information about police officers who were disciplined for misbehavior, or who used deadly force or committed crimes. Instead of complying with the law, Becerra’s department refused to release past records — and filed costly legal challenges, which he repeatedly lost.
President Joe Biden has nominated Becerra to head the Department of Health and Human Services, so he’s unlikely to pay a political price for such behavior. Nevertheless, the attorney general’s foot-dragging on police-accountability laws should remind Newsom that if he’s called upon to replace Becerra, he should find someone willing to live up to the agency’s higher principles.