Bonta chosen as next top cop
Criminal justice reform would remain top priority for state’s first Filipino American attorney general
Gov. Gavin Newsom nominated Rob Bonta, a progressive state Assembly member from the East Bay, to be California’s next attorney general Wednesday, handing the role of the state’s top law enforcement official to a leading voice for overhauling the criminal justice system.
The Alameda Democrat could bring a new focus to an office that has become increasingly enmeshed in the debate over police brutality and racial bias in public safety practices. Bonta will implement a law he helped shepherd through the Legislature last year that requires the attorney general to investigate
any incident in which a law enforcement officer kills an unarmed civilian.
As one of the most liberal lawmakers in Sacramento, he also pursued measures to ban private prisons and immigration detention centers, clear old marijuanarelated convictions and abolish cash bail, a move that California voters overturned last fall.
Bonta said Wednesday that his priority would continue to be his work to fix what he called “our fundamentally broken criminal justice system.”
“Criminal justice reform is ripe for change that can be led by the attorney general’s office,” he said, though he added that he would keep an open door for police and prosecutor groups that have fought many of his bills.
“I will have those conversations with law enforcement. They will have my respect,” Bonta said. “We will have dialogue, and we will also have respectful disagreements. But it won’t be because we didn’t have a conversation.”
If confirmed by the Legislature, Bonta, 48, would be California’s first Filipino American attorney general. Advocates publicly campaigned in recent weeks for Newsom to name an attorney general who would prioritize programs to combat the rise in antiAsian American violence, with Bonta at the top of their list. Newsom introduced him as his nominee in a news conference at San Francisco’s International Hotel, the site of a longrunning battle in the 1970s over the eviction of elderly Filipino American residents.
Bonta said he would use his “bully pulpit” to raise up the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities that have been attacked, while also pushing for a new hotline to track hate crimes, prioritizing their investigation, and making more legal and mental health resources available to victims in their own languages.
“One of the most painful things about the hate crimes against the API community is that they had seemed to be swept under the rug, that no one cared, that those lives and those people weren’t valued,” he said. “I value them.”
Born in the Philippines while his parents were working as missionaries, Bonta moved to California as an infant shortly before thenPresident Ferdinand Marcos moved to impose martial law. Bonta spent his early childhood in La Paz, near Bakersfield, where his parents were organizers with the United Farm Workers union.
Bonta said Wednesday that their fights against injustice had been “hardwired into my DNA.” He recalled that his father registered African Americans to vote in the South during the civil rights movement and that his mother, a Filipina immigrant, had locked arms with other activists in protests outside the International Hotel four decades ago. She joined Bonta at the announcement of his nomination, wearing a bright blue embroidered silk outfit called a Filipiniana.
Bonta graduated from Yale University, where he played on the soccer team, and Yale Law School and worked for nearly a decade in the San Francisco city attorney’s office. He won election to the Alameda City Council in 2010, then successfully ran two years later for the state Assembly. He was overwhelmingly reelected in November to a fifth term.
Bonta’s nomination follows months of intense lobbying for the attorney general position, particularly by groups seeking representation for California’s marginalized communities. He was also a favorite of progressive criminal justice organizations, which pushed the governor to select someone who would take a more proactive role in holding police accountable for misconduct.
“This is an incredibly important office in the cause of racial justice, social justice, economic justice, environmental justice,” Newsom said. “Rob Bonta has been there consistently as a leader.”
Bonta would be the second consecutive California attorney general to be selected by a governor. If confirmed by the Senate and Assembly within 90 days, he would serve out the nearly two years left in Xavier Becerra’s term. He would be eligible to run for election to a full fouryear term in 2022.
Becerra was confirmed last week as secretary of health and human services for the Biden administration, giving Newsom an opportunity to redefine the direction of the state Justice Department as it enters a new era.
Becerra was nominated by thenGov. Jerry Brown after Kamala Harris was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016, and his tenure as attorney general was dominated by former President Donald Trump’s term. Becerra notably sued the Trump administration more than 120 times, leading California in legal challenges on everything from the Affordable Care Act and abortion funding to tailpipe emissions standards and immigration detention.
But with a Democrat now in the White House, his successor’s attention will turn to the Justice Department’s other duties, a broad portfolio that includes confiscating guns from people who are not allowed to own them and enforcing a new consumer data privacy law.
Tinisch Hollins, executive director of the advocacy group Californians for Safety and Justice, said it was reassuring that someone with a deep “recognition of the flaws in our system” had been nominated. She said she hoped Bonta would advance policies that have run into political obstacles.
Bonta already introduced legislation this year to remove police misconduct probes from district attorneys who accept campaign donations from police unions. He is also making a second attempt at ending cash bail.
He previously worked on an unsuccessful measure to compensate victims of excessive police force and supported a proposed constitutional amendment to abolish the death penalty in California.
“We need folks who can use their authority to advance equity,” Hollins said. “That office has a direct responsibility and opportunity to be able to champion things on behalf of the people.”