The California Progress Report has published a blog article calling on Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez to speak up regarding SB 1019 – the bad cop bill. The article is written by Mark Schlosberg, the American Civil Liberties Union Northern California (ACLU-NC) Police Practices Policy Director and Kate Kennedy, an ACLU-NC Police Practices Intern on SB 1019.
I normally excerpt other posts, but this one deserves your full attention. Here it is:
The significant and unwarranted force used by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department on May 1, 2007 at MacArthur Park has been widely reported. Demonstrators and members of the media were subjected to baton strikes and rubber bullet shots as police broke up a largely peaceful immigration rally. Unfortunately, the public will never learn which officers committed misconduct and what discipline, if any, they received because of the August 2006 California Supreme Court decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court.
Senator Gloria Romero
We have fought for years….to get
Police and Fire responders serving
cities…to be required to live in
those cities served.
After a great deal of study on the
subject…we find the days of the
local cop or fireman living next
door….are over. We use the Newport Beach example: The cost of
living and buying a home in NB is
even beyond the normal Cop or Fire
Fighter pay. This issue is a
safety issue as well; especially
for communities like Santa Ana,
Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach.
Open public record of addresses and
telephone numbers for Police Officers and Fire Fighters is an
open invitation for disaster. It
only takes one nut with a ax to
grind to find some very bad situations. What we support of
course…is a generic reporting
of Officer wrong doing: How many
citizens complaints occurred to
the various department in calendar
year 2006 or whatever? What type
of complaints? What was the
corrective action? These types of
records should be open because they
don’t name – names! It wouldn’t
take a Doctorate in Sociology to
determine if a particular organization or department had a
possible problem.
We long for the days…when we
could call our local Mayor and say: “Mayor, you have an officer that is out of control…call the Chief and get it fixed!”