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from Nigel DuaraCalMatters
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Under increasing pressure from a restless public, in the summer of 2020 the legislature passed a bill that put police shootings of unarmed people under the jurisdiction of the California Department of Justice.
The belief at the time was that pulling investigations from local prosecutors—the same prosecutors who relied on police officers to testify in criminal cases—would reduce conflicts of interest and restoring faith in the judicial system it was the subject of national protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In the five years since then, the police shooting program has closed 41 cases. He never recommended charges against an officer who shot and killed an unarmed man. CalMatters initially reviewed this program after your first yearand returned to explore the program in its fifth.
Here’s what we found:
Investigations take longer
Attorney General Rob Bonta initially promised to wrap up investigations into the shooting within a year. That hasn’t happened yet.
On average, the investigation takes nearly two years and five months. Eight investigations, including a cluster of cases in rural Northern California, have continued for the past three years.
The Department of Justice claims it is underfunded. The police shooting program only got $13 million a year, even though it wanted $26 million. In their first investigation, the program’s researchers already complained that they were understaffed.
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Some exceed the statute of limitations
When someone is accused of a crime, whether they are a police officer or not, the state has a certain time limit to file charges. For 92% of crimes in California, that term is three years. For some crimes, such as murder, there is no statute of limitations.
When Justice Department investigations stretch back three years, that means an officer can't be charged with certain crimes potentially related to the case — crimes that previously targeted officers who shot and killed people. Some of the crimes the DOJ cannot charge after three years include manslaughter and aggravated assault.
Expiration of the decertification deadline
A year after California created its police shooting investigation program, the Legislature passed a law that would allowed police departments to revoke officers' licenses for serious misconduct, revocation of their law enforcement license.
But decertification also has a time limit: three years.
So as the investigations dragged on for the past three years, the DOJ could no longer recommend that any officer lose their certification.
The certification program is administered by a state agency, the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST. POST told us it can launch an investigation on its own if an employee is accused of serious wrongdoing.
Was local accountability better?
Before the police shooting investigation program went into effect, many law enforcement leaders and district attorneys predictably opposed it.
But some liberal, reform-minded prosecutors also had their doubts about his potential. Specifically, they worried that taking investigations out of local hands would reduce the pressure people could put on their district attorney.
The cases now go to Sacramento. The District Attorney should never be responsible for the decision to file or not file charges against a police officer.
"The local concern, the local protests, the local interest is being felt by local prosecutors," said Christine Soto DeBerry, who created a unit that investigates police officers in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, where she was chief of staff.
Local investigators back down
Local police and sheriff's departments must still conduct their own investigations into police shootings. After all, someone was killed in their jurisdiction. Bonta's office says nothing in the law prevents local authorities from conducting their own parallel investigations.
But we found that, from a practical point of view, local authorities took an impartial approach after Bonta's office intervened.
"If the case meets the criteria under the (police shooting law) and the Department of Justice confirms that it is taking over the investigation, we do not conduct our own parallel criminal investigation or conduct our own criminal investigation after the Department of Justice completes its investigation," said Capt. Brian Cole, who leads the Redding Police Department's detective division. "They have full criminal jurisdiction over the matter."
Although the DOJ says it only looks at an employee's potential criminal culpability, in practice that means their investigation is the only shooting once they take office.
This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.
