Sacramento police reforms are a good start, but replacing broken system won’t be easy

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg on Monday outlined some good first steps toward restructuring the city’s police department.

The mayor wants the department to establish an Inspector General position to investigate police shootings and other use-of-force incidents. He also wants to create a new public safety operation that would allow non-police personnel to respond to 911 calls that do not involve crimes.

“Steinberg’s idea to send trained civilians instead of armed officers to some 911 calls is modeled after similar programs in Eugene, Ore., and a pilot program in Portland, Ore.,” wrote Theresa Clift of The Sacramento Bee.

In Eugene, for example, a special team of people trained for mental health interventions and de-escalation responds to calls that do not involve crimes. This reduces the chances of a deadly encounter between police officers and mentally-disturbed individuals who may need help instead of harassment.

The Crisis Assistance Helping Out On the Streets team (CAHOOTS) consists of an emergency medical technician or nurse paired with a certified crisis worker for “mobile crisis intervention 24/7.” They, rather than police, respond to complaints about people suffering from homelessness or psychological crisis.

To establish Sacramento’s own version of this team, Steinberg proposes moving funds from the police department to fund a new department that could be fully operational within two years. On Monday, Steinberg proposed moving $5 million from the city budget’s general fund to get started on the new “non-law enforcement responder unit.”

This seems like a concrete, credible proposal deserving full City Council support.

The idea for the Inspector General is also long overdue, but the council must ensure that the investigator has full independence. Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones revealed the false premise of such positions when he fired Inspector General Rick Braziel for finding that Sacramento deputies were not justified in shooting a mentally-disturbed man named Mikel McIntyre to death in May 2017.

In 2018, Jones locked Braziel out of his county offices and effectively terminated his contract because he didn’t like the IG’s findings. Sacramento’s version will need to have strong safeguards against any such political interference.

On Monday night, members of the Measure U committee asked the mayor why the police department should receive over $41 million in Measure U funds this year while economic development receives only $4.6 million. It’s an important question the mayor and the City Council must consider in the light of current events.

Steinberg wasn’t the only official in California who called for big changes on Monday. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, the state’s “top cop,” also called for a sweeping change that would allow the state to decertify officers found guilty of misconduct. California is one of a handful of states that does not have a statewide decertification system for police who resign or get fired for allegations of misconduct. This allows bad officers to simply get hired by police departments in other cities.

Last year, The Bee partnered with 30 other California news organizations on an investigative series called “Criminal Cops,” which exposed the degree to which problematic or convicted officers continue to wear badges and guns in the state.

“They hired a cop investigated in an FBI child porn probe, and another caught up in an LAPD burglary ring. They gave a job to an officer who filed a bogus insurance claim for a car his friends dumped in Mexico. And they brought in a cop with a conviction for pulling a gun on his stepdaughter’s friends,” wrote reporters Laurence Du Sault and Katey Rusch about the Central Valley town of McFarland.

One officer was accused of having sex with a teenager, and another was accused of threatening women with jail if they refused sexual relations with him. Yet they kept their guns and badges.

During the course of the investigation into California’s criminal cops, Becerra threatened reporters with legal action after they obtained a list of 12,000 officers, former officers and officer applicants with criminal convictions. The information had been “inadvertently” released by the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) to reporters at UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting program.

It’s nice to see Becerra awaken to a problem that was outlined in detail last year by journalists he threatened to prosecute, but he’s hardly a hero. Becerra has been no friend of reform, and those who seek structural changes to policing would be wise to view his sudden interest with distrust — and to find a progressive candidate to run for attorney general in 2022.

Steinberg’s proposals, and Becerra’s awkward attempt to embrace reform, make one thing clear: California’s leaders feel the pressure to make big, overdue changes. The devil, however, will be in the details.

Those who believe the issue of police violence and racism requires major structural changes must remain vigilant to see them through.

This story was originally published June 16, 2020 at 5:00 AM.