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A teacher at one San Francisco protest last week urged the city’s schools to end security contracts with the police department. A man’s speech at an Oakland rally included a call for more police body cameras and said officers should lose their jobs if they tamper with the devices. Leaning out of a car window as she passed a demonstration in San Jose, a woman held aloft a sign reading “stop protecting bad cops.”
Amid a national wave of protest sparked by a Minneapolis officer’s killing of George Floyd, and decades of pent-up anger over ongoing abuses by police against people of color, outraged demonstrators and elected officials are calling for sweeping changes to limit law enforcement’s authority and weed out bad cops.
As demonstrations enter a third week, new questions are emerging: How will the most widespread civil unrest in a generation change law enforcement? And will those changes resolve the systemic racial abuses that have drawn millions of people across the country and tens of thousands in the Bay Area into the streets?
“We’ve done tasks forces, we’ve done blue-ribbon commissions,” said Lateefah Simon, a nonprofit leader who Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday would be part of a new state police reform group. “The fury, and why cities are burning, is because folks are sick of that malaise.
“You have a system that is in dire need of not just reform but transformation,” Simon said.
Activists are pushing cities to redirect funding from law enforcement to social services as local governments grapple with spending cuts forced by the coronavirus pandemic.
At the federal level, congressional Democrats are expected to unveil a package of bills overhauling law enforcement on Monday.
But some of the most significant changes could come from Sacramento, where a statehouse that for decades championed broad police powers has moved more recently to roll back that authority.
Since the Black Lives Matter movement pushed calls for police reform to the national forefront nearly six years ago, there have been changes in policing — training on racial bias is more widespread, as is the use of body cameras and the embrace of de-escalation techniques meant to prevent the use of force.
“It’s not like policing has been stagnant,” said Jeffrey Noble, a former deputy police chief in Irvine who now researches police use of force.
But, Noble said, those changes were “low-hanging fruit” that failed to shift the culture in many troubled departments.
Even departments that have embraced reforms have continued to come under scrutiny for use of force and racial bias.
Newsom has endorsed a plan to end officers’ use of the carotid restraint — the “sleeper hold” maneuver in which an officer incapacitates a suspect by cutting off circulation of an artery in the neck, briefly restricting blood to the brain and causing them to pass out.
Some departments already prohibit the hold because, when it is misapplied, the windpipe can be blocked or crushed, strangling a person, sometimes fatally. The officer who killed Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes was using a riskier variation of the hold that is even more broadly prohibited.
Newsom announced Friday that he was directing the state’s police standards office to stop offering training on the controversial restraint, and put his support behind a bill in the Legislature that would ban the practice.
Meanwhile, four Democratic legislators, led by San Diego Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, have announced a proposal to limit law enforcement’s use of rubber bullets, following criticism that police have been too aggressive in using the less-lethal projectiles when confronting protesters.
Lawmakers could also take on the question of revoking the badges of officers found to have committed serious crimes or misconduct. California is one of only five states that doesn’t have a process for “decertifying” officers.
“A cop can resign or get fired from a job, and then move to another law enforcement agency throughout the state and get rehired,” said Dennis Cuevas-Romero, a legislative advocate for the American Civil Liberties Union of California. “This is a time for members of the state Legislature to say enough is enough.”
Among the most sweeping proposals is a bill the ACLU is co-sponsoring to create a pilot program for “community-based alternatives” to conventional law enforcement — civilian workers who would be tasked with responding to problems relating to broader societal issues such as homelessness, drug addiction or domestic violence.
Critics argue police are ill-suited to dealing with those issues but have become de-facto first responders to them because of a tattered social safety net. Activists have called for shifting the responsibility away from police and toward more robust community services that they argue would eliminate the need for a law enforcement response.
It’s a shift that gets at once-radical notions of the role of police in society, notions that this protest movement has forced to the fore: In many cases, activists are debating not just how to reform American law enforcement, but whether the institution should continue to exist as we understand it at all.
“We should move in a direction where we reduce the footprint of law enforcement over time,” Cuevas-Romero said.
But it remains unclear whether the proposed reforms will win support from law enforcement, or whether police will view the ideas as unrealistic demands that put them in danger. Some proposals in years past have failed or been watered down in the face of law enforcement resistance.
“We’re happy to sit down and discuss all of the stuff that is being brought forward,” said Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, which represents more than 75,000 police officers.
That includes the topic of decertifying cops — an idea the law enforcement lobby has long resisted.
“There is a perspective that these bad cops roam around to other agencies, and we don’t want that,” Marvel said.
Still, he added that it was too soon to take a position on the various reform ideas because specific bill language has not been released.
Noble and others who are calling for changes see a renewed opportunity not just in the widespread protests over the current state of policing, but also in the broad condemnation from within law enforcement of Floyd’s death. Rather than backing the Minneapolis officers’ actions or asking for people to wait for an investigation, police leaders, including PORAC, by and large have swiftly disavowed their tactics.
Noble said that makes him cautiously optimistic that this will be the time policing breaks a generations-long cycle of “scandal, reform, scandal, reform.”
“We’ve got to find something that sticks,” Noble said.
