When I read the Chronicle’s front page article, “Thousands of officers could be decertified,” I thought, “Good. Let California’s new police decertification law fire up to 5 percent of all the cops in the state. Maybe the resulting crime wave will show people how much we need cops.”
There was a tone of gleeful malice in the article, what the Germans call schadenfreude, as if the Chronicle were happy that misfortune has struck California peace officers. The paper doesn’t hide its woke orientation. Its young reporters and editorial writers make no secret of their prejudice against policing.
The decertification law dates to 2021, when Gov. Newsom signed a bill “that would allow the state’s law enforcement accrediting body to decertify officers for serious misconduct--essentially kicking them out of the profession for things like sexual assault, perjury and wrongfully killing civilians.” Senate Bill 2, while wide-ranging, essentially boiled down to this: “this bill would prohibit a person who has been convicted of a felony…from regaining eligibility for peace officer employment…”. The Democratic-authored bill, part of the response to the George Floyd protests of the previous year, always was ambiguous about the definition of “serious misconduct,” a term that, like a Rorschach Test, can mean different things to different people. This was the main reason why so many police departments opposed SB2: if individuals with a pronounced bias against the police were in charge, as they inevitably would be, they would find “serious misconduct” whenever they wanted and wherever they looked. This fed into the widespread conclusion by police and their unions that “some policymakers continuously push for police reform measures without considering the real impact on their communities and without any input from anyone who has ever worked in the profession.”
This is, of course, exactly where we find ourselves today in California, and especially in Oakland where, as I wrote on Friday, over-regulation of the police is harsher than anywhere else in America. The chronic shortages of cops in cities like Oakland and San Francisco is primarily due to the perception of younger would-be applicants that public attitudes are relentlessly stacked against cops, stoked by woke politicians who have always resented the police, and who have not budged an inch from their positions despite the crime wave and the pleas of ordinary citizens for greater police protection.
Nonetheless, and despite common sense, many people in the Bay Area continue to buy in to the radical fantasy that—as a letter writer to the Chronicle put it—“We don’t want more cops on our streets.” Who is “we”? Certainly not me, and not the members of the Coalition for a Better Oakland. Not a majority of Black residents. Not business owners who don’t want to be robbed. Not shoppers who don’t want to be mugged or killed. This same letter writer concludes her missive with these shameful words: “[London Breed] should…not put more money into a [police] department that is literally killing members of our community.” It would be hard to find a sentiment more out of step with reality and more twisted than this expression of one person’s irrational hatred. In fact, it is members of the so-called “community” that are killing each other, not cops.
And yet the left’s war on the police continues unabated. SB2 seems likely to strip a large number of cops from the ranks of our police departments, and will increase our vulnerability to criminals and ne’er-do-wells. Yes, we don’t want rapists or murderers to serve as cops. But too many fine police officers are getting swept up in these dragnets, and we need to have their backs.
Steve Heimoff