No copout on police reform

On the subject of police accountability, Congress is a missingpersons case. Despite nationwide protests sparked by the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, the Democratic House and Republican Senate were unable to agree on any of the relatively modest law enforcement reforms they considered.

California lawmakers still have a chance to clear this low bar. While potentially important legislation to enable statewide disqualification of wayward officers appears to have been bottled up, other worthwhile reforms remain under consideration in Sacramento.

A bill by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, DBerkeley, would require disclosure of law enforcement records related to use of force, wrongful arrests and searches, sexual misconduct, and racial and other forms of bias and discrimination. The bill would build on a 2018 police transparency law also championed by Skinner, which began to correct California’s backward, officially enforced code of silence about bad cops.

Another pertinent reform expected to be considered Friday by a Senate committee would require the state Department of Justice to investigate questionable police shootings upon request by a local district attorney or police department. As bill author Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, DSacramento, has noted, Attorney General Xavier Becerra has been loath to take on such cases. In June, the attorney general declined the Solano County district attorney’s plea to investigate a Vallejo police officer’s dubious killing of a 22yearold San Francisco man, Sean Monterrosa, although he subsequently opened a probe into the department’s destruction of evidence in the case.

Also up for consideration in the Senate this week is a bill by Assemblyman Mike Gipson, DCarson (Los Angeles County), to ban carotid and choke holds, among other techniques with a significant risk of suffocation. In the wake of the recorded police asphyxiation of Floyd, among others, proscribing such tactics might seem like the least policymakers can do.

The U.S. Senate, on the other hand, has already proven otherwise by failing to take up a House measure that would have outlawed choke holds. On that and other needed police reforms, the Legislature has to do better.