Police Reform in San Diego Is a Sick Joke
San Diegans have been asking for oversight of its police department for decades. Police chiefs have made promises. Politicians have made speeches. Activists have organized protests. Ballot measures have passed. And all this so-called progress has been for naught.
Stories in Voice of San Diego and on KPBS are saying that, once again, the will of the people has been thwarted.
Measure B, passed in 2020 with 75% of the vote, was the latest attempt to involve citizens in oversight. San Diego was supposed to be getting a watchdog panel made up of community volunteers with the power to launch its own investigations and subpoena witnesses.
It was supposed to have a professional staff with the authority to investigate incidents involving police use-of-force and certain misconduct complaints. The organization would recommend policy overhauls and ensure that the San Diego Police Department complied with all local, state and federal data-reporting requirements.
As has happened in the past, the latest version –aka the San Diego Commission on Police Practices– has proven to be yet another cruel joke played on those who believe law enforcement should be responsible to the people being taxed to fund it.
We were supposed to get an interim Commission on Police Practices that would be functioning until such time as a permanent group could be vetted and trained. As was true with the process of getting Measure B approved, every step in the process of getting the project on the road ran into bureaucratic detours.
The measure tasked the city council with creating an ordinance setting out the parameters of the commission’s processes and responsibilities. As was true with earlier efforts at police reforms, City Attorney Mara Elliott’s draft of an implementation ordinance got bounced. The city hired an outside counsel to get the job done.
Then there were more delays caused by concerns over language in the ordinance and disagreements with the San Diego Police Officers Association over specific provisions.
The interim commission is now down to 8 of the 25 members mandated, and announced last month they were suspending public meetings and pausing its case reviews. In other words, it’s dead in the water.
Many cases brought before the group ended up being of no consequence because California’s Peace Officer’s Bill of Rights requires police departments to close an investigation and implement punishment for an officer within one year of starting the investigation. (There are few exceptions.)
From Scott Rodd at KPBS:
Two-and-a-half years after San Diego voters overwhelmingly approved more robust community oversight of law enforcement, the commission charged with reviewing cases of alleged police misconduct has effectively ceased operations.
The backlog of unreviewed cases is so bad that the San Diego Police Department (SDPD) is now closing many internal investigations without any input from the city’s oversight commission.
“It is a travesty,” said Andrea St. Julian, co-chair of San Diegans for Justice. “The City Council has worked in such a way that, instead of creating a more robust oversight mechanism for the city and for the police department, they have basically destroyed it at this point.”
From Kelly Davis at Voice of San Diego:
The City Council could not fill vacancies on the commission until the ordinance was adopted, which happened last November. In early December, the city opened the application process for new commissioners, garnering 60 applicants for the 25 seats, all of which must be filled at the same time, [interim chair Doug] Case said.
The application period closed Feb. 15.
On Wednesday afternoon, City Council President Sean Elo-Rivera announced that on May 22, the council will consider appointments to the commission. He described implementation of Measure B as “a massive citywide effort requiring collaboration and coordination between each branch of city government, city employees, employee unions, and the public.”
If all these delays and hurdles sound suspicious it’s because they are.
Police departments around the country have taken advantage of rules designed to protect them from interference by other branches of government to create entities hostile to outside oversight. It’s a silo capable of withstanding public opinion, co-opting prosecutors, and blackmailing elected officials with threats, like refusing to enforce nuisance laws in a specific district.
This is why District 4 Councilmember Monica Montgomery Steppe declined to be interviewed for the KPBS story, for fear of further derailing the process by uttering anything hurting the sensitivities of the city’s law enforcers. It’s a game being played, where “going public” is the ‘nuclear option’ derailing behind the scenes efforts.
The political activities of police agencies are often sub-rosa. “Copaganda” efforts are more impactful when perceived to come from organic sources. Alec Karakatsanis’ substack on Assembling A Crime Wave (along with much of his other writings) explains the process and its effectiveness.
Today’s Union-Tribune has a variation of this process embodied on its front page, with the headline: SDPD chief: recruitment to fill vacancies urgent - Nisleit requesting 10 times more money than mayor budgets.
The SDPD has a recruiting problem. Response times are down due to a lack of officers. And the underlying supposition is that, unless they get more money for recruiting by way of hiring a local PR firm (hmmm…) the problem is only going to get worse.
The image of policing nationwide has suffered thanks to incidents revealing racial bias, along with promises by politicians that law enforcement will be used to enforce abhorrent social policies. And the (mostly) unspoken supposition that sworn personnel will spearhead efforts to make unhoused humans “go away” can’t be helping, either.
There is a bigger problem than declining numbers of officers at play, namely that the role they play in society needs to be re-examined. True copaganda stories always mention the George Floyd protests and crime is running rampant mentions.
The natural impulse to resist change combined with police unions (mostly) below-the-radar political clout stands in the way of having a public discussion.
A citizen's police commission via documentation of the impact of certain types of enforcement could be a starting point, but in San Diego, there’s no way in hell that will happen.
Someday in the future historians might discover the active role law enforcers have played in subverting change. In the meantime, we’ll have to go by the axiom “If it walks like a duck…”
Very Interesting News
Punishing PBS via Oliver Darcy at Reliable Sources. Oklahoma’s Governor has vetoed a bill renewing the license of the Oklahoma Educational Television Association, the statewide network carrying PBS content, as a protest against “LGBTQ-inclusive programming.”
It produces and airs the "Oklahoma News Report," the only state news program that reaches every county in Oklahoma. And, crucially, it is the broadcast network that state authorities rely on to disseminate emergency alerts to the public, including for severe weather, a frequent and dangerous occurrence in the Tornado Alley state.
Enjoy those tornados, folks.
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Bill will allow denial of your healthcare based on moral, ethical, or religious beliefs. Via Tallahassee Democrat.
Gov. DeSantis has signed this bad boy. So if you’re having an operation or just need a checkup, make sure you can prove membership in a “Christian” religious organization.
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House Republican Report Finds No Evidence of Wrongdoing by President Biden Via the New York Times (Cough, cough)
After four months of investigation, House Republicans who promised to use their new majority to unearth evidence of wrongdoing by President Biden acknowledged on Wednesday that they had yet to uncover incriminating material about him, despite their frequent insinuations that he and his family have been involved in criminal conduct and corruption.
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GOP 2024 hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy proposes raising the voting age to 25 Via CNN Politics.
He may be an outsider candidate, but Ramaswamy is simply voicing a political idea making the rounds on the right. It’s a good thing this would require a constitutional amendment.
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It seems to me that the Governor of Oklahoma unconstitutionally refused to fund PBS in the state based on his argument that the channel included subject matter he found troublesome. That's a clear, governmental, violation of First Amendment rights and I hope the state PBS channel will sue accordingly.
I have always believed in the intent of the mantra, Defund the Police! Many misinterpreted the oft-used words because they didn't seem politically correct. Our system of policing from the Sheriff's Dept. to the forces in every city needs reform and that will never be accomplished with the same old rules in place. When Dave Myers was thrown under the bus by the local Democrat establishment, drunk on their power again, I knew we were in for the same old tactics. I'm fed up with all those who bend to the party rule without questioning why!