Police Reform in California? or Not (on the removal of the grand jury process and the right to film cops)
With our own social media newsfeeds on scroll with grassroots coverage of police terrorism, the media and elected officials are looking to appease growing anger in response to abuse and ongoing anti black executions by the police. This week state legislators in California patted themselves on the back for passing key “reforms” around police violence accountability, or so they said.
Time and time again we are hearing stories of unnecessary harassment by the police resulting in the death penalty. As if “stop and frisk” wasn’t bad enough in creating constant fear in communities of color, we are witnessing the normalization and heightened visibility of “stop and kill” tactics by police against people of African descent harassed in situations non black people would survive, or not even be detained over. Yet the stops continuously turn into executions over minor infractions and major ego issues on behalf of the police or while in custody.
The mainstream news cycle plays on repeat defending the actions of the police even when they retaliate violently against any public outpouring of grief or protests demanding accountability. Before we go giving too much credit where credit is not due let’s really look at what has changed.
The governor just signed SB-411 also known as the “right to record” bill amending sections 69 and 148 “interfering with an officer” to exempt photography, audio and visual recording of police.
The added text includes “(g) The fact that a person takes a photograph or makes an audio or video recording of a public officer or peace officer, while the officer is in a public place or the person taking the photograph or making the recording is in a place he or she has the right to be, does not constitute, in and of itself, a violation of subdivision (a), nor does it constitute reasonable suspicion to detain the person or probable cause to arrest the person.” For full text.
This is because police have detained, harassed, attacked and jailed people for filming them in spite of the fact that there has never been a law against filming the police. The changes to sections 69 and 148 do not make any significant difference because the problem was never whether filming the police was legal or not, considering it was implied as free speech activity.
The problem was and is excessive police violence/ use of force and abuse of power when interacting with people. Not whether we have the “right to record” but that the police react defensively with violence and communities targeted by anti blackness and law enforcement are not given the same space and privilege to “exercise their rights” to begin with. The problem is the quick-to-execute use of force by police, and the lack of intervention to prevent police violence or create consequences for it.
Bills like this are part of the problem because ultimately we don’t want to just be able to record police violence, we’ve been doing that, we want to be able to prevent or stop it. This bill doesn’t address deadly executions by cops and it isn’t police reform, it’s a token dropped in a wishing well when copwatching is no longer enough and has actually become co-opted by the state through the use of bodycams.
Effective next year, California will be the first state to ban the use of grand juries in determining whether to file charges against police responsible for using deadly force.
The grand jury is not a court proceeding, but a separate legal body empowered to determine whether criminal charges should be brought. Grand juries have served as a secretive process that can help police effectively outmaneuver the system they enforce by circumventing arrest and charges. It’s like a fake trial, with no transparency, to determine whether there should be a trial. The prosecutor/DA has to initiate the grand jury process, and has the most influence in how it goes.
Evidence gathered is kept quiet and then released strategically, and most grand juries result in no indictment for killer cops. Grand juries take time, they dull the urgency felt right after someone is killed by police and have been used by law enforcement and other agencies to prevent movements from springing up in the place of state justice.
Non-police suspects are never given the opportunity to have a legal body outside of court determine whether criminal charges should be filed. The police arres on charges, the DA or city attorney’s office prosecutes no questions asked. Since we know that police are not going to charge themselves with a crime, especially a felony assault or murder charge, the sole decision on whether to pursue prosecution in cases of police involved fatalities still falls to the DA. It’s almost as if the police are the ones who decide if charges are filed.
The court already has a system for pursuing felony charges- most people get arraigned and face a preliminary hearing. But grand juries are preferred when it comes to public officials or high profile cases. The grand jury was never a requirement to indict police, and is only required in cases involving federal felony charges. Why police benefit from an entirely different process than the one they enforce is beyond me. This means that getting rid of the grand jury process for police means next to nothing since it still comes down to the discretion of the prosecutor. A prosecutor who has had the power the entire time to investigate and charge police personnel but often chooses not too. One person, one position, and that person and position works closely with the police at all times. Their job depends on it.
It’s good that there will no longer be selective use of the grand jury process to buffer police from criminal prosecution while making it appear like the situation is being investigated. Now it’ll be clear- they are charged or they aren’t. But with no alternative presented, no process put forward to help families who just lost their loved ones and often end up facing increased harassment by the police, removing grand juries doesn’t really do a damn thing.
It actually regulates, but does not reshape, how we deal with police use of deadly force. It doesn’t provide any guidelines on how the DA should handle deadly force cases or provide any consequences whatsoever if those guidelines aren’t followed or enforced.
This is why uprisings and public outpouring of people in the streets, disrupting the means of social order (which depends on ignoring anti black state violence) is the leading cause for most indictments or trials for killer cops. Currently, there is no intentional or accountable process for determining responsibility for lives taken by cops even though the number of deaths at the hands of police this year alone has passed 711. Just yesterday Aug. 13th the police executed Joe Bart in Oakland and Redel Jones, a 30 yr old black woman in Los Angeles.
So what’s becoming clear is that it’s no one’s job but ours to create consequences for the police and to challenge and put a stop to anti black racism and deadly violence. The state isn’t going to guarantee basic trials and due process to deal with violent racist crimes by state representatives (the police) and it sure isn’t putting resources toward preventing police terror.
It doesn’t address structural racism built into policing and the court system, or why police are so exempt from being policed or captured by the court system themselves. It doesn’t address the way prosecutors and police collaborate with the media to slander the reputation of their victims. It doesn’t offer any new proactive solutions, or any alternatives to investigate the police when an officer involved death happens. It actually implies that if the DA doesn’t choose to charge the police in open court, that evidence might not ever be released.
These laws are the tiniest chip off the entire system of police privilege in California, but they don’t restrict law enforcement in any capacity and that is by design. This is a large reason why more and more people are turning their attention away from state sponsored “reform” and looking for ways to structurally alter “justus” as we know it.