California bill would govern police use of deadly force
SACRAMENTO — Flanked by civil rights advocates, California lawmakers announced legislation Tuesday designed to make it easier to prosecute police officers who kill civilians.
“We have been deeply saddened and frustrated by the killing of black and brown men by law enforcement,” said Democratic Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, the bill’s author. “It seems that the worst possible outcome is increasingly the only outcome that we experience.”
The bill follows the Sacramento shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed 22-yearold black man who was killed in his grandmother’s backyard last month by police looking for a vandal in the neighborhood. Lawmakers described Clark’s killing, and other instances in which officers shot black and Latino residents, as the impetus behind the legislation.
The Sacramento incident has sparked protests in the capital city, and Raj Manni, grandfather of Clark’s children, attended Tuesday morning’s news conference at the Capitol.
Weber and other legislators supporting the bill described the measure as the most far-reaching in the country to allow the prosecution of officers who kill civilians. Under current law, police use of deadly force must be “objectively reason- able.”
Weber’s bill would make two key changes. It says officers could use deadly force only if it’s necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily injury or death, encouraging prosecutors to consider whether officers could have deescalated the situation with verbal warnings or nonlethal force. It also would allow prosecutors to take into account an officer’s actions before a killing that could have negligently put the officer in harm’s way.
Advocates pointed to the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland in 2014 as an example in which it might have been easier to charge officers under the proposed standard. In that case, Cleveland police responded to a 911 call mentioning someone who was pointing a gun outside a recreation center, and killed Rice, who was holding a pellet gun. Officers pulled up within feet of Rice and shot him less than two seconds after arriving. A grand jury declined to indict the officers, saying they reasonably feared for their safety.
Activist groups cheered the announcement of Weber’s bill Tuesday. Samuel Sinyangwe, co-founder of Campaign Zero, the policy arm of the Black Lives Matter movement, said no state currently takes into account officers’ actions leading to killings when determining whether to prosecute. Just four states — Delaware, Iowa, Rhode Island and Tennessee — require officers to exhaust all other reasonable means before using deadly force, Sinyangwe said. There are 17 percent fewer police killings in those states than in the rest of the country, according to data compiled by Sinyangwe’s organization.
“It’s a huge deal,” Sinyangwe said of the bill. “It’s probably the biggest thing that can be done to address police shootings is to address deadly force standards.”
Robert Weisberg, a Stanford University law professor and co-director of the school’s Criminal Justice Center, said it would be hard to tell how much the proposal law might change prosecutors’ ability to charge officers or win convictions. No officer, he said, is going to say that it wasn’t necessary to use deadly force. And it’s unclear, he said, how much time before to specific incidents that officer behavior could be scrutinized as part of a criminal case.
Still, Weisberg said the bill would add pressure to prosecute police.
“It is clearly a kind of admonition to the courts and to police officers that the ante is being upped,” he said.
Law enforcement organizations are expected to strongly oppose the legislation. Officer groups have long noted that police have to make split-second decisions to protect bystanders and their own safety, something courts must take into consideration when weighing the use of excessive force.