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Gov. Newsom is wrong to secretively gut California’s much-needed police reform law

June 25, 2023

When most Californians think about the state’s yearly budgeting process they don’t expect the governor and the Legislature to shape major public policy outside the scope of spending decisions.

But that is exactly what is happening right now as Gov. Gavin Newsom is advocating for a “Trailer Bill” within the state budget that will undermine a key 2021 police accountability and transparency law just as it’s about to be put into practice.

In 2021 California closed one of the biggest gaps in police accountability by adopting the Kenneth Ross Jr. Police Decertification Act, also known as SB 2. The premise of SB 2 is simple: an officer fired in one police department for misconduct or abuse of power one day, should not have the ability to walk into a neighboring police department and get a new job as an officer the next day.

SB 2 accomplishes this by creating a process to take away an officer’s certification when they are found guilty of serious misconduct or abuse of power. This process is carried out by the California Commission on Peace Officers’ Standards and Training (POST). In addition to the decertification process, key to SB 2’s importance in serving the public interest are its transparency provisions. Under current law, POST is also tasked with receiving and making police misconduct records available to the public, ensuring that residents and news agencies across the state are informed about problems that exist in their cities’ police departments, which tend to make up the largest portion of any given city’s general fund expenses.

It is these transparency provisions that Gov. Newsom is pushing to do away with by exempting POST from disclosing personnel files, and kicking the responsibility of making misconduct records public back to the individual police departments. This is problematic in and of itself when we consider how adversarial local police are to the release of misconduct records.

We need only look at the number of lawsuits police and sheriff associations across the state filed to keep misconduct records hidden from the public after SB 1421 went into effect in 2019, another landmark transparency law. Or we can look at how common it is for local police agencies to routinely destroy personnel records after a set number of years, as we saw with the OC Sheriff Department in 2021.

Recently, the Antioch Police Department was caught in a major scandal when dozens of officers were revealed to have been using racist slurs and making racist jokes in text conversations with one another.

In a statement to CBS 8 Antioch Councilmember Tamisha Torres-Walker said: “Had the records related to the investigation not been made public this scandal would have never been uncovered[…]and the criminal acts demonstrated by the Antioch Police Department and other neighboring law enforcement agencies would have gone unchecked and continue to target and harm black and brown members of our community.”

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SB 2 was a carefully negotiated piece of legislation between police accountability and transparency advocates and legislative leaders with close ties to the powerful police and sheriff unions that have fought every major effort at policing reform in Sacramento, and at times, it was even a contentious fight. Passing it was a multi-year effort, in which it failed to garner enough support from state legislators in 2020 before ultimately passing in 2021.

History shows us time and time again that leaving transparency decisions to local police agencies hinders the goals of police accountability and transparency reforms like SB 2.

Gov. Newsom must drop his push to weaken SB 2 through the budget process and allow California to move forward as a leader in justice reform.

Hairo Cortes is the executive director at Chispa, a leading proponent of SB 2 as well as Santa Ana’s new Police Oversight Ordinance.

Orange County Register

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Gov. Newsom is wrong to secretively gut California’s much-needed police reform law

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