In the News

Ninety minutes after midnight on a recent Saturday, Sacramento resident Jackie Andersen learned that her son – a lively 16-year-old student at American Legion High who played football and basketball – was dying. Read More

The LAPD sent its dive unit into a Van Nuys storm drain Thursday, looking for an “unknown dark object” that officers told investigators they saw a man holding before they fatally shot him.
Police said the man threw a 40-ounce beer bottle through the back window of the officers’ patrol car on Saturday night, prompting them to bail out and open fire. The man died at the scene. Read More

The Southern California Auxiliary – Wives Behind the Badge, Inc. is proud to bring Paint the Town Blue to Southern California to show support for law enforcement. Read More

When Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a 10-year ban on gun ownership for people who had been convicted of certain gun-related crimes, he said the bill was one of a group of measures that would needlessly clutter California’s law books by finding new ways to penalize conduct that was already illegal. Read More

Waving American flags and holding up signs that read “Blue Lives Matter,” about 100 Los Angeles police officers joined members of the community at a rally in Hollywood on Saturday intended to show support for the department at a time when crime is spiking and the ambush killings of police officers in cities elsewhere have left authorities across the nation feeling under siege.

The demonstrators gathered first in front of the CNN building on Sunset Boulevard and later at the nearby Hollywood Community Police Station. Motorists, including patrol officers and firefighters, expressed their appreciation by honking horns and sounding sirens. Read More

Former Mayor Chuck Reed said Friday he will either rewrite his state ballot measure that asks voters to approve public pensions or sue state Attorney General Kamala Harris for what he calls a “misleading and unfair” description designed to negatively sway voters.

It’s the second time Reed has taken issue with Harris’ title and summary of his pension reform initiative. The same argument in 2013 derailed efforts to place a similar measure on the ballot in time. Read More

One of three officers injured in two inmate attacks at Folsom prison is undergoing treatment for a concussion with brain bleeding, according to Lt. Aaron Konrad, public information officer for California State Prisons, Sacramento.

The officer was punched repeatedly in the head by an inmate in an incident that followed an earlier melee between 10 inmates and two other officers. Those officers were treated at an area hospital for sprains to the forearm. Read More

San Jose police officers shot and wounded a man Thursday after being sent to a mobile-home park to check on welfare of an individual, officials said Friday.

The shooting broke out at 6:34 p.m. at Monterey Oaks Mobile Home Park in the 6100 block of Monterey Road, said Sgt. Erique Garcia of the San Jose Police Department. He said officers received a call to check on the welfare of a person at the mobile-home park. Read More

Police: Body cam video highlights difficulty of discerning real from fake guns
WEST VALLEY CITY — Newly released body cam video documents an intense gunpoint encounter with West Valley City Police officers and two teens armed with guns that turned out to be fake.

Police are pointing to the ordeal as an example of why it’s difficult for officers to discern fake from real guns at times when the use of deadly force is possible.

The video, obtained by KSL through an open records request, offers a first-person police perspective of the exchange that took place the night of Sept. 11 on the grounds of Monroe Elementary. Read More

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department will now require a judge’s approval before it uses its high-tech Stingray surveillance tool, Sheriff Scott Jones said Tuesday, unveiling a new policy governing the controversial technology.

The device’s technology mimics a cellular network’s cell tower, tricking a cellphone and other mobile devices into connecting to it. The cellphones can be identified and text messages and outgoing calls can be intercepted without the users’ knowledge. Law enforcement can then use the information to collect location data from investigative targets. Read More

He was not a terrorist with a dirty bomb in his suitcase.

He was not a stalker with a Glock in his fist.

He was not even a mugger with a switchblade in his pocket.

James Blake was not, in other words, an imminent danger of the sort that might have justified a police officer in tackling him to the ground last week, as much of the world has now seen in a surveillance video. All Blake was — more accurately, all the police believed him to be — was a guy who had committed credit card fraud. Read More

Two men received the state’s highest award for police valor on Monday, including — for the first time — one from San Bernardino.

Officer Marcus Pesquera, 24, was honored for his quick and life-saving action in the gunbattle that wounded his field training officer, Gabriel Garcia, in August 2014.

At the time, Pesquera had graduated only seven weeks earlier from the San Bernardino County sheriff’s training academy, but he calmly followed academy training, Gov. Jerry Brown’s office said in a written statement. Read More

San Francisco police are investigating whether two of their officers violated department policy by having a “graphic” conversation that was caught on video and posted on Instagram in which they discuss what they would and would not want to be captured on body-worn camera footage in an officer-involved shooting.

Officials with the police officers union called reaction to the footage “completely overblown,” but Chief Greg Suhr said he expects his officers to “maintain the decorum and operate by an order of standards, policies and procedures.” Read More

A recent Gallup poll finding that public employees are happier than private-sector workers with their pension plans and other benefits has elicited a condescending response from the conservative American Enterprise Institute’s economics blogger, James Pethokoukis.

At least we think it’s condescending. His post is headlined: “No surprise: Government workers are way happier with their pension plans than private-sector counterparts.”

For employees who spend a career in state government, generous pensions put retired public workers among the highest earners in their state.
– Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute
It’s possible, one supposes, that Pethokoukis thinks the superiority of public pension plans is a good thing, and that he’s implicitly arguing that private employers ought to meet the public sector’s higher pension standards in order to keep their employees happier today and comfortable in retirement Read More

EDDYVILLE, Ky. — A Kentucky state trooper was killed in a shooting during a chase, and officers fatally shot the suspect when he refused to drop his weapon after an hours-long manhunt, officials said Monday.

Trooper Joseph Cameron Ponder, who was 31 and had been on the force less than a year, was conducting a traffic stop Sunday night on Interstate 24 when the driver fled, Kentucky State Police said.
A chase ensued with the suspect stopping abruptly, causing the trooper’s vehicle to “make contact” with the rear of the suspect’s vehicle, said Trooper Jay Thomas, a state police spokesman. Read More

Thirty minutes before the meeting at a South Los Angeles church was supposed to start, the parking lot was already full.

Hundreds of people packed the pews of Hamilton United Methodist on Sunday — so many that some were left standing even after the choir lofts were filled. There were elected officials, community activists and gang intervention workers. LAPD commanders and a police commissioner. There were mothers whose sons had been killed on the city’s streets, and one man who had been shot himself a month ago. Read More

The Los Angeles Police Commission has six months to re-examine some of its more controversial policies on the use of body-worn video cameras, commonly called body cams, before making any revisions. Those policies require officers to review body cam footage before completing reports.

And in cases where officers have used serious force, they must look at the footage before speaking with department investigators about what happened.

Those requirements fly in the face of the best research on memory. The available science tells us that the integrity of police officers’ reports requires that they not view the video footage, and the Police Commission should seize the chance to reverse its policy. Read More