Commentary: It’s time to curb police violence
http://www.elkgrovenews.net/2020/06/commentary-its-time-to-curb-police.html

By Dan Walters | CalMatters Columnist |
One would
think that with demonstrations against police brutality raging throughout the
state, even in small rural towns, officers who monitored the protests would have
been on their best behavior.
Not so.
Gratuitous violence against marchers, innocent bystanders and reporters wearing
identifying vests and/or displaying credentials was rampant.
In
Vallejo, which has a sorry history of police killings, Detective Jarrett Tonn,
riding in a patrol car during demonstrations, saw Sean Monterrosa carrying what
he thought was a gun and fired five shots through the car’s window, killing the
young man.
Vallejo
police didn’t even announce Monterrosa’s death for a day and a half, but
finally declared that Monterrosa had no gun and was on his knees with his arms
raised when Tonn shot.
“They
executed him. There was no reason for them to kill my brother like that,”
Monterrosa’s sister, Ashley Monterrosa, told ABC7 News.
It’s an
old story, sadly reminiscent of what happened in Sacramento two years ago when
two cops fired about 20 bullets at a shadowy figure they thought had a gun. A
young black man, Stephon Clark, was shot eight times and died with a cellphone
in his hand, not a gun.
Clark’s
death supercharged a long-nascent campaign to change California’s deadly force
laws. Last year, after much negotiating, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly
Bill 392, which says deadly force is legally allowable only “when necessary
in defense of human life.”
Monterrosa’s
death in Vallejo may become the first test of the
new law.
Attorney
General Xavier Becerra announced that he will review the Vallejo Police
Department, whose officers have killed 19 suspects since 2010. No Vallejo
officer has been charged for an on-duty shooting, but taxpayers have paid out
more than $7 million to settle civil lawsuits.
Becerra
stopped short of intervening in the Monterrosa case, but the Solano County
district attorney’s office is on notice as it decides whether Tonn should be
prosecuted.
California
clearly has a problem with police violence, not only in the long list of dead
unarmed suspects, but in the aggressive tactics during protests of George
Floyd’s suffocation death with a Minneapolis policeman kneeling on his neck.
Police
unions have long had a cozy arrangement with the Democratic politicians who
dominate California, trading campaign endorsements for hefty benefits and
special legal protections. California is one of the very few states, for
instance, that don’t revoke the “certifications” of officers who are fired,
thus allowing them to continue working elsewhere.
That
unholy alliance cracked a bit last year with the passage of the new shooting
standard, and with events this year, the unions know that their clout is
fading.
Last
weekend, in full-page newspaper ads, the unions representing cops in Los
Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose proposed a slate of reforms.
“No words
can convey our collective disgust and sorrow for the murder of George Floyd,”
the unions said in the advertisement. “We have an obligation as a profession
and as human beings to express our sorrow by taking action.”
Their plan
includes reforms adopted by some individual agencies, a national database of
former police officers fired for gross misconduct and a national use-of-force
standard that “emphasizes reverence for life, de-escalation, a duty to
intercede, proportional responses to dangerous incidents and strong
accountability.”
It’s a
start, but only a start. We need good cops to deal with those who prey on the
public, and we need alternatives to police for purely social problems such as
public intoxication. The onus is on Newsom, Becerra and other Democratic
officials to step up.
CalMatters
is a public interest journalism venture committed to explaining how
California’s state Capitol works and why it matters. For more stories by Dan
Walters, go to calmatters.org/commentary.
Elk Grove News is a media partner of CalMatters
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