Police

California Waters Down Murder Police Ban So Police Can Still Get Away With Murder

State assembly managed to pass police shooting reform that will reform nothing.

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(image via Getty)

The California state assembly passed new legislation meant to deter police shootings. It’s being hailed as the most stringent police violence reform in the country.

The legislation, my friends, is crap. It will fix nothing, it will reform nothing. Unarmed black people will still be shot to death in California by the police. Their murderers will still go free. The only thing that will change is that the offending officer will have to mouth slightly different words while justifying his or her decision to kill black people.

The legislation changes the use of deadly force standard. Currently, deadly force is authorized when the officer “reasonably” perceives they should kill a black person. Now, they can only kill black people when it’s “necessary.” From NBC:

It would allow police to use deadly force only when it is “necessary” to defend against an imminent threat of death or serious injury to officers or bystanders.

I award the biggest of whoops to this functionally semantic change. Yes, in a legal classroom, there is a gulf of difference between a reasonable standard and a necessary standard. The new standard goes in the direction of objectivity, but falls short. It tries to take us out of the head of a trigger happy racist who “reasonably” confuses a 15-year-old black kid for the Incredible Hulk, and asks us to consider whether the Hulk was actively smashing people, or passively working on his computer. It’ll make for a fun question people will fail on the California bar.

But on the street and in the courts, this change means functionally nothing. Cops will still shoot people when they feel “threatened,” and they will still feel “threatened” by people based on the color of their skin. Then the cops will go to court and say, “It was necessary for me to shoot that fleeing black kid in the back because he was knocking into other pedestrians as he tried to save his life from me.” And all-white juries will still acquit those cops on the theory of keeping negroes in line. A “necessary” standard still puts us in the head of what the cop thinks is “necessary,” as the law provides no definition of a “necessary” use of deadly force.

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The law didn’t have to be this useless. The original version of the bill prohibited cops from shooting unless there were “no reasonable alternatives.” That’s still not great, but at least you can imagine a checklist of alternatives a cop has to consider before firing, including non-lethal force or even (gasp) letting a black person get away.

But cops didn’t like that standard, and so they were able to force the legislature to amend the language. In fact, you can tell that this law will do nothing to reform police behavior simply because the police did not object to its passage. The vote was 67-0, no Republican voted against the bill, and the police union didn’t take a position on the bill.

Folks, you’re not doing anything about police violence against black people if Republicans and cops aren’t upset. Any real reforms to protect black lives would piss these two groups off. Their acquiescence is not a virtue of the bill, it’s an indictment of the bill’s effectiveness.

This desire to get cops on board goes to a fundamental misapprehension of the problem. The bill’s author, Shirley Weber, made a well-meaning statement that indirectly gets to the heart of the problem:

“This bill will only work because of the buy-in from the communities as well as from law enforcement,” said Democratic Assemblywoman Shirley Weber of San Diego, who wrote the measure. “Police officers should never take a human life when there are alternatives. AB392 is about preventing unnecessary deaths.”

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Yes, this bill will only work with buy-in from the cops, and that is why it won’t work.

You can’t fix this problem with police buy-in. You can only fix this problem with police accountability and punishment. The police aren’t going to like that. They’re not supposed to like it. We’re not supposed to care if they like it or not. The police are killing black people because it’s easier for them to kill black people than risk their own lives figuring out if the black person should die. The only way to make them change that calculus is to make it clear to them that they are risking their own lives, either way, when they are making the decision to fire. Wait, and the suspect might get the drop on you. Shoot without being absolutely sure you have to, and the courts might put you away forever. That’s gotta be their choice, or they’ll never stop shooting us.

We have to recenter this debate around the life of the victim, and not the apparatus of the state. I would go for straight-up burden shifting: If the cop kills somebody, the victim is presumed innocent and it’s on the cop to show that the shooting was necessary by a preponderance of the evidence. No more of this “I feared that his big black lips were coming to suck out my soul,” bullcrap. PROVE that you had to shoot or go to freaking jail.

Of course, white people will never go for that. No no, if a black person gets shot, most white people assume he was doing something wrong. Making that assumption literally illegal for a cop to make is just not what’s going to happen. White people know that the cops are there to protect and serve THEM, and don’t want to make that job any harder than it already is. They’d rather place the burden on my children to prove they deserve to live than place the burden on their cops to prove my kids had to die.

Failing my standard, we could at least expect cops to satisfy a checklist of other, non-lethal options. Or we could ask cops to justify EVERY bullet fired, so often the victims of police violence might have survived the first shot, but are taken out when the cop (and sometimes his cop buddies) unload their entire clips.

And failing all that, we could at least extend liability for the wrongful death we do prosecute to the entire unit. The cops know who among them are the proverbial “bad apples.” They know which of their brethren has no business policing non-white communities. But they say nothing and do nothing, and when the shooting goes down they hide behind their blue wall of silence. That’s what criminal conspiracies do, and it seems to me that the very least we could do is to start treating the police as such. One of these assholes shoots an unarmed kid, and the entire freaking department pays for it, unless they cooperate with investigators.

All of those proposals have teeth. All of those proposals would get cops protesting in the streets, promising to not work, as if I really want a cop who won’t adhere to some measure of force restraint on the job in my neighborhood, around my black children anyway. All of those proposals would lose Republican support.

This California bill won’t help a damn thing. That’s why it passes so easily. They might as well slap an All Lives Matter sticker on it and issue every black teenager a can of invisibility spray, for all the good it will do.

California Assembly approves bill to deter deadly police shootings [NBC News]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@preprod-atl.staging.breakingmedia.com. He will resist.

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