Grand jury law will help rebuild trust
Editorial
In the wake of Ferguson, California this month became the first state in the nation to outright ban the use of secret grand juries to investigate police killings of civilians.
Like most broad-brush solutions, this has downsides. But on the whole, encouraging transparency in deciding whether to file criminal charges against officers is the right thing to do. In many communities across the country, there’s a crisis of confidence in the police, and rebuilding trust is critical to public safety — including the safety of the officers themselves.
Another law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown this summer is equally important: clarifying that it’s legal to take video of police in public places.
The public outrage over secret grand juries ignited after the killing of an unarmed black man by a white police officer in the racially polarized city of Ferguson, Missouri. Along with several other killings by police in questionable circumstances, this ignited the national “Black Lives Matter” movement.
The Ferguson grand jury declined to indict the officer, who said he believed his life was in danger. A public proceeding might well have ended the same way, but the secrecy obscured any merit in the argument of self-defense. A similar grand jury finding in a Staten Island case intensified the perception of injustice.
The downside of banning grand juries for police cases is the loss of their investigative value, says Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen. Grand jury subpoenas can elicit testimony from witnesses who otherwise might not cooperate.
That said, DAs in most major counties don’t routinely use grand juries in police cases these days. Rosen never has. Instead, they investigate, decide for themselves whether to prosecute and then issue public reports explaining why, ideally in great detail. This doesn’t guarantee transparency, but people can hold DAs accountable at election time.
And let’s just take with a truckload of salt the comment last week by Mark Zahner, CEO of the state’s District Attorneys Association: “It’s absolutely ludicrous to espouse or believe that police officers get treated any differently than anyone else.” Noted. Not all incidents of police killings are created equal. There’s a big difference between Ferguson and, for example, the two shootings by police in San Jose this week. Both of them occurred in confrontations with armed suspects in a sadistic last week that had been captured on security video. (The Mercury News obtained pictures from the video, linked to this editorial at www.mercurynews. com/opinion.)
Most people are grateful to officers for risking their lives to track down killers. But in San Jose, Oakland and other Bay Area cities, minorities often feel they’re targeted by officers for no reason. Confidence needs to be rebuilt.
California’s new laws on videos and grand juries can help with that.