Just a Start: City Council, Supervisors Move on Police Reforms

There is about as close to a national consensus as you’ll ever see in this country about changing the manner in which justice is administered. 

Now comes the hard part; making sure those vested with the power to enforce and prosecute don’t find a way to dilute or undermine proposals or policies the public is demanding.

Twenty five million people have joined ongoing protests against racism and police brutality in the U.S. since the murder of George Floyd.

A supermajority of Americans, according to recent polling, believe the criminal justice system either needs a complete overhaul (29%) and/ or major changes (40%). Only 5% of those polled  believe no changes are necessary.

The San Diego City Council has passed a resolution promising to vote next month on a ballot measure on replacing the existing police oversight body with a far more powerful version, one that could conduct independent investigations, with subpoena power and its own legal counsel. If this sounds like a squishy public relations ploy, you might be right. 

Note that similar versions of this proposal were waylaid by subterfuge in 2016 and 2018. A wave of demonstrations around the world has made this reform palatable to the powers that be.

The public will, no doubt overwhelmingly approve the measure. And then the fun will begin, namely seeing how the hiring and procedural practices involved in implementing oversight play out.

Why is this change important? Let’s take a look at a conclusion in the Campaign Zero assessment of the SDPD:

• When civilians came forward to report police misconduct, it rarely led to accountability in San Diego. Of 226 civilian complaints of San Diego Police Department conduct in 2016 and 2017, only 11% were ruled in favor of civilians. Moreover, complaints alleging the most serious misconduct were never sustained. For example, of 21 civilian complaints of police discrimination, 75 use of force complaints and 2 complaints alleging criminal misconduct, none of these complaints were sustained.

Since a majority of the City Council seats, the Mayor, and the City Attorney are all up for grabs this fall, just how effective this reform will be should be a campaign issue for all those races. 

Platitudes won’t do when it comes to November elections. Candidates for these seats need to make specific promises to carry out the will of the people on this matter.

Via the Washington Post:

• While a majority of Americans across all racial groups report feeling sad, angry and troubled by Floyd’s killing, black people perceive the country’s police forces as far more racially biased than white people do, the poll finds. More than half of black adults say they or someone they know had an unfair interaction with police in the past few years. More than a third say there was an occasion when they feared being hurt by a police officer — much higher than the shares of white and Hispanic Americans reporting the same experiences.

Not to be outdone, yesterday the Board of County Supervisors voted for three law enforcement reform measures, including creation of an Office of Equity and Racial Justice.

The impetus for these changes came from Supervisor Nathan Fletcher, who was also successful in getting the board to agree to increase the powers of the county’s Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board. 

The county will also be setting up mobile crisis response teams trained to respond to non-violent incidents concerning people experiencing behavioral health crises in the hope of avoiding escalation when law enforcement gets involved.

Again, from Project Zero:

• An even lower proportion of civilian complaints were sustained that alleged San Diego Sheriff's Department misconduct. Of the 417 complaints reported to the San Diego Citizens Law Enforcement Review Board from 2016-2018, the board sustained only 18 complaints. This represents a 4% complaint sustain rate overall, including a 3% sustain rate for criminal allegations, 0.4% sustain rate for excessive force and 0% sustain rate for allegations of police discrimination.

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Lest you be confused by the public relations ploys of local police, let's examine a recent example of abuse to assist in informing us of just how big a task righting the wrongs of the criminal justice system is going to be. 

https://twitter.com/add/status/1275483563253620737?s=20

The abductee was charged with assault on a police officer, a result of her allegedly (witnesses dispute this) swinging a cardboard sign (reportedly made from a cut up cereal box) in the direction of a uniformed motorcycle officer. The case is under “prosecutorial review” with the City Attorney’s office. 

She won’t face charges. And since it's a "secret," the police apparently got practice abducting people off the street, a tactic undoubtedly learned from watching documentaries about totalitarian countries.

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Just 29% of Americans, according to a New York Times-Siena College poll, have bought into the President’s ‘get tough’ approach on protests. Considering that 30% is the basement for approval numbers of an incumbent chief executive, I’d say the time for change is at hand.

If you think complaints about police responses nationally to protests have been exaggerated, consider this, via Common Dreams:

• An extensive new report released Tuesday morning by human rights group Amnesty International finds that between May 26 and June 5, local, state, and federal law enforcement officials in 40 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. committed more than 125 separate acts of violence against demonstrators who gathered in the streets en masse to protest the police killing of George Floyd.

• Law enforcement officials "consistently violated human rights out on the streets instead of fulfilling their obligations to respect and facilitate the right of people to peacefully protest," said Amnesty, which published an interactive map containing video evidence of police officers beating, teargassing, and firing rubber bullets at protesters.

• "The analysis is clear: when activists and supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets in cities and towns across the country to peacefully demand an end to systemic racism and police violence, they were overwhelmingly met with a militarized response and more police violence," Brian Castner, senior crisis adviser on arms and military operations at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

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A huge part of changing the criminal justice system on the local level will involve restoring trust at the national level. 

Today’s testimony before Congress by Justice Department officials gives what I would bet is just a glimpse of just how rotten things are in Washington.

• A federal prosecutor and another Justice Department official plan to tell Congress on Wednesday that Attorney General William P. Barr and his top deputies issued inappropriate orders amid investigations and trials “based on political considerations” and a desire to cater to President Trump.

• Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland formerly detailed to Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation, will tell the House Judiciary Committee that prosecutors involved in the criminal trial of Trump’s friend Roger Stone experienced “heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break” by requesting a lighter sentence, according to Zelinsky’s prepared remarks. The expectation, he intends to testify, was that Stone should be treated “differently and more leniently” because of his “relationship with the President.”

• Zelinsky will be joined by John Elias, an official in the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, who will say that Barr ordered staff to investigate marijuana company mergers simply because he “did not like the nature of their underlying business,” according to his prepared testimony.

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