Stop conning families whose kin are killed

It’s simply unconscionable — wrong in every way — for law enforcement in California to withhold the information that a loved one has died at the hands of police from a family even as they question that family about their loved one.

It’s using the color of authority to try to build a case against the dead before even letting the family know they are dead.

And yet an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program “verified 20 instances of detectives and prosecutors across California using death notifications as opportunities to collect disparaging information about people killed or seriously injured by police,” as the Times reports.

This past spring the investigation won a George Polk Award, one of the top honors in American journalism.

Reporters worked off a tip that in the last five years the practice was increasingly in use by California law enforcement. They traced it to webinars created by the co-founder of Lexipol, a company contracted by police departments to train their officers that also writes policy manuals for California departments. In a 2019 online training, Bruce Praet “encouraged officers to get to the families of people killed by police ‘before the dust settles,’” the investigation found.

Californians killed at the hands of police are a lot more than the mere settling of bureaucratic dust. They are real people whose deaths need to be investigated objectively and independently and whose families need to be told immediately of their fates.

Assemblymember Ash Kalra, D-San José, read the investigation and decided to do something about it. He authored Assembly Bill 3021, which would have mandated that law enforcement tell relatives of those killed or seriously injured by police the status of their loved one, and to essentially give the family their own Miranda rights: the right to remain silent, retain an attorney and know whether they are being recorded.

Such a law would have codified nothing more than fundamental decency for the people of California.

And yet it was blocked in the California Senate last week when legislative leaders failed to bring it up for a vote before Saturday’s deadline for new laws.

That was wrong. The bill should be revived and allowed to be fully considered by the Legislature and signed by the governor during the next legislative year.

“Law enforcement does have a lot of influence still in this building,” Kalra told the Times in the Capitol Saturday night. “I don’t think they like when they’re told how to conduct their business, but I think there are situations where they need to be told how to conduct their business, and this is one of them.”

Of course police departments bridle, and sometimes properly so, at attempts by lawmakers to micromanage their important work. In order to seek and find justice for victims of crime, they must be allowed to pursue effective measures.

But those effective measures, by law, don’t include, for instance, slamming suspects’ heads against the wall during interrogations in order to get them to talk. For well over a century, lawmakers have properly passed state laws placing limits on what officers of the law can do as they carry out their work.

Lobbyists for police agencies were the main opponents of Kalra’s bill in the Legislature. “Imposing rigid requirements on peace officers, prosecuting attorneys, and investigators could ultimately impede the pursuit of justice and compromise the effectiveness of law enforcement efforts,” the Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Assn. wrote in opposition. “Requiring peace officers and prosecutors to disclose specified information before interviewing family members could compromise the confidentiality of ongoing investigations.”

Kalra’s bill was not in fact a “rigid requirement.” It instead would simply require full disclosure. “I’m disappointed that grieving families mean so little to the California Senate,” said Sharon Watkins, whose son, Phillip Watkins, was killed by San José police officers in 2015. “The possibility of healing community and police relationships will not be possible without this bill.”