California Assembly Backs Weber’s Bill To Deter Shootings By Police

Speaker 1: 00:00 After months of negotiations between legislative leaders, police and civil rights groups on Wednesday, California Assembly members past assembly bill three 92 by an overwhelming majority moments before the vote. San Diego Assembly woman, Shirley Weber spoke on the assembly floor asking for her colleagues support. I'm also mostly thankful to two little kids who inspire me every day and their name is Claudia and Julio, my grandsons who are seven and five, because I'd made a commitment that I never want to have that conversation with them. Their life was idealic. They have great friends of all colors. They enjoy life and they believe at this point that they have just as much right and respect as any other child in this nation. And that should never change. If Assembly bill three 92 passes the state Senate, it would give California one of the toughest police use of force standards in the country, changing the standard from reasonable to necessary Los Angeles Times. Reporter, I need a Schaumburg. Aa has been following the story and she joins me now by Skype. Anita, welcome. Thanks jade for having me. Uh, first in that clip we just heard from Shirley Weber, she says she made a commitment not to have that conversation with her grandsons. It's a conversation that had happened in my household. What conversation is she talking about? Speaker 2: 01:21 You know, uniformly when I, uh, have been covering police shootings for the past few years, African American parents, mothers and fathers, tell me about the conversation and it's really about talking to their children about what to do in an encounter with police officers to avoid violence. And this is not a conversation about manners or, uh, you know, how to be polite that maybe someone else would have with their parents. It's specifically about how to avoid being hurt because there's so much fear in the African American community that something as simple as a traffic stop could lead to something else. So, you know, it's keeping your hands on the wheel at 10 and two, it's not making any sudden movements. It's things like that, that African American parents, I think you would know better than I, but almost uniformly feel that they need to teach their children in order to keep them safe and police encounters. Speaker 1: 02:15 Absolutely. Manda I know there's hope that this bill will change that the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of this bill, which uh, you know, a few members abstained from that. Were you surprised that it was so, uh, received so well that there was so much support? Speaker 2: 02:30 I was not because the police unions have dropped their opposition and the governor and the leadership of both houses have signed on. So it's really a, at this point it would take something big to derail this bill from becoming law Speaker 1: 02:45 and some black lives matter groups and victim's families withdrew their support for the bill last week. What were their criticisms of the compromise? Bill Speaker 2: 02:56 comes down to some of the families and there's lot of division on this be in, in the families that have lost a loved one to police violence. Many, many still support this and I just want to be clear on that. But for some families that work with black lives matter in Los Angeles and a northern California group called Debug, they really feel that because the wording and the legislation has become vague, some of the definitions have been removed, like for, for necessary what necessary is not defined. That what we'll have to happen is that there will have to be a fatal police shooting that goes to the courts before we start to decipher what this law means. And having lost someone to an incident like that, they just didn't feel that they could sign onto something that's going to cause another family to go through that before we know what it means. Speaker 1: 03:45 And you also spoke to Cif Johnson, the uncle of Oscar grant, the unarmed black man killed by a Bart police officer back in 2009 in Oakland. Uh, and he has a different perspective. Uh, what did he have to say? Speaker 2: 03:58 He, he does a cfs is very much in favor in this bill, this bill in a very, very strong supporter and believes that uh, it will ultimately make a very big difference and that it's a first step bill that takes us down a path that, you know, as he put it, we haven't seen anything like this in 10 years in California. Nothing's, nothing's made it this far. And to uh, not support it because it is imperfect is, is not his path. He wants to support it because he feels it does create stricter standards. Speaker 1: 04:30 And you know, as you mentioned before, one of the major concerns is a lack of definition for the term necessary as the standard for use of force. What are legal experts saying about that? Speaker 2: 04:42 That we're going to decide it in court? You know, it's interesting, whoever, when you talk to law enforcement, they sort of have one perspective on what that means. And when you talk to civil rights groups, they have a very different perspective on that. What that means and what they all agree is that the judges will decide for us what that means Speaker 1: 05:00 and assembly bill three 92 is intended to work in tandem with another bill that recently passed the state senate. Remind us of the expectation for these bills working together. Speaker 2: 05:11 Two 30 actually started out as a countermeasure to 392 so when when two 30 was first introduced in the Senate, it was meant to be an alternative that perhaps more moderate legislators could vote for this and say they were voting for reform and and maybe three 92 would go away. What ended up happening is I'm in sort of another surprise move that bill had all of its use of force language stripped out of it and it became just a training bill. So it's just about setting statewide standards for training and for deescalation and things like that, which does become a vital part of three 92 because of course if you change the standard, you have to retrain all the officers on what that standard is and what the expectations are. So the way it is right now is a two 30 has been joined three 92 which means it can't pass on its own. Speaker 2: 06:01 It can only pass if three 92 passes and I fully expect them both to pass together. Have there been any conversations around implicit bias? Absolutely. I think that that is absolutely one of the things that you will see in the two 30 training. So I don't know if it'll actually get written into it or if post, which is the cause I don't have a body that does the training world, we'll take care of that. But absolutely the conversation about implicit bias is one that is happening at the capitol and that is an expectation of how officers will be trained. Assembly bill three 92 now heads to the state senate, which is also expected to make amendments. Uh, any indication of what those might be. I think we'll see some kind of delay on implementing three 92 in order to allow the training of officers to catch up. Speaker 2: 06:50 I think that it will take a couple of years to retrain all of California's officers to whatever standards we end up with. And so you can't really hold them to those standards until they've all been retrained. Any idea of when the next vote might take place, it'll go through all the committees of the Senate again. So, uh, it'll be a ways, but you'll be able to check in with it as it goes through committee because I expect that there'll be some conversations around those as well. I've been speaking to Los Angeles Times reporter and Nita Shabrea. Anita, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Jane. I appreciate it. Speaker 3: 07:22 [inaudible].