There’s a huge political battle shaping up over California Senate Bill 2, a “police reform” measure by (mainly) Democratic legislators. It would crack down hard on cops for “serious misconduct,” including accusations of excessive force, sexual assault and racial or ethnic bias. (I did a pretty thorough analysis of SB2 a few months ago. You might consider reading it for background info.)
No one wants “bad cops” out there on the streets. The argument concerns who are to be their judges and juries when they’re charged with, or convicted of, bad stuff. Cops themselves, through their unions, say that police departments are in the best position to understand the issues, and can be trusted to rein in and punish renegades; it’s a sort of peer review. Police critics respond that it’s ridiculous to trust cops to patrol themselves.
A key issue of SB2 is who would serve on its proposed advisory board, a kind of statewide police commission that could, in effect, fire cops and prevent them from being rehired anywhere else in California. SB2 proposes that the board include individuals with a history of working on police misconduct issues, and people who have been victims of excessive force, or whose family members have been killed by police. Critics object that such individuals may be subject to emotional biases that make them unfit to serve as impartial observers.
A big supporter of SB2 is the American Civil Liberties Union of California. Lizzie Buchen is a lobbyist for them. This following remark of hers is typical of those who justify the proposed makeup of the advisory board. “It is just bewildering that law enforcement is afraid of civilians having any say in this entire process,” she says, adding, “The idea that their presence is going to bias the entire system is just absurd.”
It’s not absurd. I’ve had people with power over the Oakland Police Department frankly admit to me that they don’t like cops and want to get rid of them. We know of close ties between elected officials, such as City Council member Carroll Fife (the most radical cop-hater on the council) and the virulent Anti Police-Terror Project, which launched the Defund OPD campaign; according to published reports, Fife’s husband, Tur-Ha Ak, is its co-founder. Suffice it to say that there are some people in this town who, by their own words and deeds, have at the very least made their objectivity questionable.
We, the Coalition for a Better Oakland, believe that bad cops should be weeded out, and should not be able to transfer from department to department while having their records hidden. That’s a no-brainer.
But the process has to be fair, and not overseen by anti-cop zealots. So I would say to Lizzie Buchen, “Nobody is afraid of civilians overseeing the police department, as you claim. That is just cheap rhetoric. But what a lot of us worry about is that the only civilians who will be appointed to these boards are people who hate cops and want to put police departments out of business. The presence of such individuals on boards and commissions absolutely does bias the entire system, and to deny this truth is to mislead and endanger the public in the most egregious way.”