Bee Opinionated: Rare clash between California AG candidates + An editorial board goodbye

Happy Sunday, y’all. It’s Yousef Baig, filling in for my colleague Robin Epley. With ballots arriving in the mail this week, I wanted to spotlight a standout endorsement interview from our exhaustive work over the past two months to help readers prepare for the general election.

Members from McClatchy’s California editorial boards recently met with the two candidates vying for state Attorney General, a high-profile job that has propelled past occupants to Washington D.C. and even the White House. We interviewed Democratic incumbent Rob Bonta and Republican Nathan Hochman, who has been (unsuccessfully) challenging the former assemblyman to a debate for weeks. With the two of them in the same virtual room for an hour, it immediately transformed into a fiery and interesting contest, and a unique glimpse into this race that no other media outlet in California can offer.

You can watch the interview in full below.

The interview — or debate, if you’re Hochman — spurred an interesting back and forth between editorial board members after, too. Ultimately, our own discussion provided greater clarity in which candidate we should endorse. But it took a second to get there, trust me.

If you’re curious, you can read that endorsement editorial here ... and sift through more of our general election content here. We’ll have roundups on our full slate of endorsements coming soon so you can bookmark it for when it’s time to fill out your ballot.

Routine escalation

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office has a poor track record when responding to incidents where someone is experiencing a mental break (and millions in lawsuit settlements under Sheriff Scott Jones’ tenure to prove it). Late last month, Elisa Dehar Naranjo of south Sacramento called 911 when her husband, Jaime, was apparently experiencing a mental break and wielding a machete, threatening to end his own life. The deputy who responded shot Naranjo and killed him within a minute after arriving, according to the family.

Epley attended a press conference last week where the shattered Naranjo family pleaded for justice, and penned a moving column, asserting that “a historical lack of accountability within the Sacramento sheriff’s department and from the supervisors who should be overseeing the agency” is to blame. Marcos Breton, who has regrettably covered far too many of these types of incidents, authored an editorial on behalf of the board:

“People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement officers, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center. So it’s appropriate that the sheriff’s department is facing questions about insufficiently training its officers to deal with such subjects.”

Some personal personnel news

This week will be my last with The Bee. Serving on the editorial board at one of the most distinguished legacy newspapers in the country has been the greatest honor of my career. More than anything, though, I’m going to miss working alongside such a wonderful and talented group of journalists who care so deeply about local journalism and distilling the truth for our readers. This team enjoys top-down support to break news and write front page stories. In today’s atrophied news industry, Sacramento is lucky to have such a high-powered opinion staff.

I’m incredibly proud of what this editorial board stands for and how it operates. It’s democratic, fact-focused, compassionate and lets the best argument win the day. It’s unafraid of taking anti-establishment positions and fearlessly confronts the power structure in Sacramento. It’s a must-read on a daily basis.

In the time I’ve been here, I hope you learned something, felt something, questioned something or found clarity on a subject that matters. If so, I did my job. The main reason I pursued journalism was to leverage my worldview to try and enlighten people and build familiarity with unfamiliar things. As I said in my first column, people fear what they don’t know and hate what they’ve never loved. Journalism can fix that.

For anyone interested, you can keep following me on Twitter, @YousefBaig. I promise I’m not going far. And I’ve got one last column before I go...

Keep supporting local news,

Yousef Baig