Get new police killings reform out of suspense

In the proper national days of reckoning about the epidemic of police violence against civilians following the murder three years ago of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the California legislation passed in 2021 requiring the state attorney general's office to independently review all fatal police shootings of unarmed civilians to ascertain whether criminal charges should be filed against officers was a welcome response.

Police and sheriff's departments — understandably, by human nature — are incapable of properly investigating themselves in such cases. Even the county prosecutors or other neighboring police agencies who traditionally investigated police shootings were rather too close to home. Some more objectivity is required, and that's exactly what the AG's office in the state capital can, and has, provided here.

Following the passage of the law, authored by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, DSacramento, Attorney General Rob Banta initially requisitioned 27 special agents and six more supervisors to create the California Police Shooting Investigation Teams, and opened offices for them in Sacramento, Riverside and Los Angeles.

But McCarty, with reason, took a look at how the original law was working, and this spring authored new tentative legislation to expand the office so that it would review all deadly incidents involving police, “including those that result in the death of someone who's armed and instances when officers used deadly force other than a firearm, such as excessive tasing or a chokehold,” as Laurel Rosenhall and colleagues at the Los Angeles Times reported last month.

McCarty said that he wanted to plug a “glaring hole” in the investigations of fatal police incidents.

“It's still something that I'm committed to,” McCarty said. “I think eventually we need to have all officer-involved shootings investigated independently outside of the local jurisdiction, preferably by the attorney general.”

The reason he is now putting that effort into the past tense is that McCarty's new proposal was nixed when Democratic legislative leaders put his bill, along with about 300 others, into the “suspense file” for this year, essentially killing it during the current legislative session.

The ostensible reason for the bill's death is more than a little murky, and the state Senate and Assembly leaders don't have to say why it happened. When Californians look at the size of the contributions police unions make to legislators' campaigns, they could be pardoned for believing that the real reason is actually crystal clear.

But it is also clear that, however well-intentioned, the process the 2021 law set up is moving agonizingly slow. Only two cases have been fully cleared, with dozens more still in the investigative process. When McCarty's Assembly Bill 1506 was passed, it said that the reviews should take no more than a year each. Most go far longer than that, and one open case is almost two years in.

It's going so slowly, in fact, that adding the new police killings that would be investigated would cost the Department of Justice “hundreds of millions of dollars” annually, it says, and require an additional 632 state workers.

Please. Is there a greater indictment of the way California government works than to offer up such a ruse? Whatever your profession or organization in which you have worked, can you imagine what adding 632 new employees would do to your team's capabilities? Such a giant organization could rule the world; certainly smaller ones have.

It's true that the original annual budget request for the AG's shooting investigation teams was $26 million, and that the Legislature halved that to $13 million. But the idea that they need orders of magnitude more money and employees in order to take a hard look at all police-involved killings is indicative of a mindset that is all too common in California government. Bring in an efficiency expert and see what adding 100 new employees with a $100 million budget could do. And get McCarty's bill out of the suspense file next legislative session so that police reform and civilian oversight can make for a better, safer California for its citizens.