California’s governor has signed into law a series of bills that give the state the power to strip the badge of officers who commit misconduct, raise the minimum age of officers and take other steps to change policing following nationwide calls for reform.
The bills signed Thursday also limit when police can use things like rubber bullets and beanbag rounds at protests. They bar restraints that can cause someone to asphyxiate and require officers to immediately report excessive force by others.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said some of the measures were long overdue. The ability of the state to decertify a police officer for misconduct is something that 46 other states already had, he said.
State Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat who authored the bill, said it aims to end “the wash, rinse and repeat cycle of police misconduct” where officers can quit one department before they are fired and get re-hired elsewhere.
“This bill is not just about holding bad officers accountable for their misconduct,” Bradford said. “It’s also about rebuilding trust between our communities and law enforcement.”
The law allowing the decertification comes 18 years after lawmakers stripped away that power from a state police standards commission. That left it to local agencies to decide if officers should be fired.
The bills were signed more than a year after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck and was later convicted of murder. The death of Floyd, who was Black, by Derek Chauvin sparked outrage and calls for changes to policing across the nation.
Police departments in California will also be banned from authorizing techniques or transportation methods that have a risk of “positional asphyxia” — which is what experts said happened to Floyd, but also can occur when people are restrained and left on the ground.
Also among the bills signed Thursday is one that raises the minimum age of officers from 18 to 21 and adds education requirements. Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer said data has shown that more mature, educated officers are less likely to use excessive force.
Another is aimed at increasing transparency of records dealing with police misconduct.
The governor and lawmakers were joined at Thursday’s bill signing by parents of people who died after police encounters.
Among them was the family of Angelo Quinto, who was having a mental health crisis in December and died after police in Antioch restrained hm. His family said police kneeled on his neck, which police have denied. The family has sued.
“Even the last four minutes of the restraint, he was unresponsive, and they didn’t address that at all,” his sister, Bella, said. “… It was just absolutely excessive and unnecessary.”
The Associated Press contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
