News & Commentary

Dear Governor Brown, Senate President Pro Tempore Toni Atkins and Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon: Today at the United Nations, Phillip Alston, the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, condemned the U.S. and the state of California in a report that details failures to protect the

As stories of state violence against Black men and boys occupy many of the calls for police reform, countless stories of Black women and girls subjected to excessive force and police misconduct remain untold. We must say their names.

On June 5, California voters paid more attention to their local top prosecutor races than ever before. In elections where the incumbent has historically gone unchallenged, there were more contested DA races in California than in recent memory — or perhaps ever before. Although incumbents retained

Danny Pham, a 27-year-old Westminster native, was serving a six-month sentence in an Orange County jail for a non-violent offense. He was close to completing his sentence. Instead, he ended up dead.

Law enforcement agencies are deploying secret and invasive surveillance technologies to collect sensitive location and biometric data, target local activists, and feed ICE's deportation machine. Technologies like drones, social media surveillance, and license plate readers have invaded people's private lives and are being exploited by the federal government to tear California families apart.

Police in California have a problem with deadly force. Last year, police shot and killed 162 people in the state, half of whom did not have guns. California departments have some of the highest rates of killings in the nation. In a 2015 report, for example, the Guardian identified central California's Kern County as the place where a member of the public is most likely to die at the hands of police.

Last week, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra provided all California public school leaders with the policies they must adopt by July to protect students from immigration enforcement while at school. 

It's a scene out of a dystopian police state: Your bus pulls into the station after a long ride, but before you can get off, law enforcement agents board and make their way down the aisle, peering at passengers. They see brown skin, or hear a foreign accent, and stop to demand identification, then proof of citizenship. Those who don’t satisfy their questions are escorted off the bus.

Students deserve to attend supportive and well-resourced schools, where they feel safe. And, as students across the country are calling for common sense gun control, the Trump administration has instead proposed to “harden” schools by increasing the numbers of armed police in schools and by arming teachers and school staff. These proposals, while cloaked in the language of “school safety,” are most likely to hasten the process of transforming schools into something more akin to penal institutions while increasing the risk to students.