New police accountability laws up demands on state agencies
California Department of Justice agents realized they were short-handed just hours after a Los Angeles police officer shot and killed an unarmed man on Hollywood Boulevard.
A 911 caller told police the man was threatening people on the morning of July 15, 2021, waving what appeared to be a pistol in a busy tourist pocket. The object in his hand turned out to be a lighter with a pistol grip.
The fatal shooting was the first test of a law requiring the Justice Department to investigate police shootings of unarmed civilians. The agents would need to interview witnesses, mark evidence and canvass nearby businesses for surveillance footage, according to documents detailing the state’s response.
The department’s budget for these complex shooting investigation teams allotted three agents; the department sent 12.
Even so, justice officials would later say, it wasn’t enough — calling their deployment “inadequate.”
“There were dozens of tasks and assignments that the … special agents could not accomplish because of limited staffing,” the department wrote in a budget request submitted to the Legislature in January.
For decades, police oversight in California began and ended within a local department. Rarely did the state step in.
That has changed. After unarmed Stephon Clark was shot and killed by Sacramento police officers in 2018, state lawmakers began taking a more active role in police accountability, passing several statewide mandates aimed at improving policing in California. Since then, they’ve tapped both the Department of Justice and California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) for new duties.
But ambitious deadlines, new job responsibilities and delayed funding are testing the limits of both agencies, officials say.
The shooting investigation on Hollywood Boulevard is still open, as are all 20 other Justice Department investigations into the shooting of unarmed civilians.
California’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training missed its deadline this year to get police departments up to speed on newly-required bias screening for police applicants. The commission has also been given new authority to decertify police officers, a responsibility that is reshaping the previously low-profile commission.
Both agencies were redirected by legislation. For the Justice Department, its new role came with Assembly Bill 1506, which mandates that its agents investigate each officer-involved shooting of an unarmed civilian. Beginning next year, upon request of a law enforcement agency, the state is also supposed to begin reviewing the local agency’s use of force policy and make recommendations.
The long shadow of George Floyd
When the Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the officer-involved shooting bill in September 2020 — four months after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police — it was a politically important piece of legislation to the governor and to then Attorney General Xavier Becerra. Current Attorney General Rob Bonta also supported the plan while still in the Legislature.
But months before the law went into effect on July 1, warning signs went up internally at the Justice Department.
“Additional burdens are increasingly being placed on the very limited staff of the (Bureau of Investigation) and (Bureau of Forensic Services),” one Justice Department employee wrote to the Attorney General in April 2021, according to redacted emails obtained by CalMatters.
“We are already stretched incredibly thin.”
The Justice Department asked for $26 million to pay for the new shooting investigation teams. The Legislature allotted half of that, about $13 million.
Becerra complained about that discrepancy to the bill’s author, Democrat Assemblymember Kevin McCarty of Sacramento.
The $13 million budget allocation “is significantly lower than our estimates and not enough resources to stand up professional teams to perform these new investigative and prosecutorial duties,” Becerra wrote to McCarty in January 2021. “As a result, the DOJ will have limited capacity to implement this bill, short of redirecting resources from other essential, mandated work, which could compromise those operations.”
McCarty recently told CalMatters that the Justice Department should be able to find a way to fund the program.
UPDATED: Please read and follow our commenting policy: