How the George Floyd protests could change policing in California
Revoking badges, banning ‘sleeper holds,’ limiting rubber bullets among ideas
A teacher at one San Francisco protest last week urged the city’s schools to end security contracts with the police department. A man’s speech at an Oakland rally included a call for more police body cameras and said officers should lose their jobs if they tamper with the devices. Leaning out of a car window as she passed a demonstration in San Jose, a woman held aloft a sign reading “stop protecting bad cops.”
Amid a national wave of protest sparked by a Minneapolis officer’s killing of George Floyd, and decades of pent-up anger over ongoing abuses by police against people of color, outraged demonstrators and elected officials are calling for sweeping changes to limit law enforcement’s authority and weed out bad cops.
As demonstrations enter a third week, new questions are emerging: How will the most widespread civil unrest in a generation change law enforcement? And will those changes resolve the systemic racial abuses that have drawn millions of people across the country and tens of thousands in the Bay Area into the streets?
“We’ve done tasks forces, we’ve done blue-ribbon commissions,” said Lateefah Simon, a nonprofit leader who Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday would be part of a new state police reform group. “The fury, and why cities are burning, is because folks are sick of that malaise.
“You have a system that is in dire need of not just reform but transformation,” Simon said.
Activists are pushing cities to redirect funding from law enforcement to social services as local governments grapple with spending cuts forced by the coronavirus pandemic.
At the federal level, congressional Democrats are expected to unveil a package of bills overhauling law enforcement on Monday.
But some of the most significant changes could come from Sacramento, where a statehouse that for decades championed broad police powers has moved more recently to roll back that authority.
Since the Black Lives Matter movement pushed calls for police reform to the national forefront nearly six years ago, there have been changes in policing — training on racial bias is more widespread, as is the use of body cameras and the embrace of de-escalation techniques meant to prevent the use of force.
“It’s not like policing has been stagnant,” said Jeffrey Noble, a former deputy police chief in Irvine who now researches police use of force.
But, Noble said, those changes were “low-hanging fruit” that failed to shift the culture in many troubled departments.
Even departments that have embraced reforms have continued to come under scrutiny for use of force and racial bias.
Newsom has endorsed a plan to end officers’ use of the carotid restraint — the “sleeper hold” maneuver in which an officer incapacitates a suspect by cutting off circulation of an artery in the neck, briefly restricting blood to the brain and causing them to pass out.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/07/how-the-george-floyd-protests-could-change-policing-in-california/