POINT: Legislation spells real progress for police brutality reform

It has been a little under two months since the anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, and finally — finally — new legislation paints real progress for police reform in California. Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown passed Bill AB 953 to require agencies to collect demographic data on those stopped by police, update the definition of racial and identity profiling to be more comprehensive, formulate an advisory board to eradicate racial profiling and increase diversity among police.

More than just a step in the right direction, the bill is indicative of a greater recognition that body cameras alone won’t fix the issue of a law enforcement that dehumanizes its citizens in a state that boasts the highest number of people killed by the police. It is comprehensive, and hopes to set a precedent for other states to take concrete steps toward limiting the influence of racial profiling.

The bill’s primary strength is that it fully addresses the state’s lack of racial profiling data, which has greatly hindered its ability to make more specific police reform. It is high time that we are able to understand the demographics of those stopped and searched so that police misconduct can be identified and more specifically traced on an individual and institutional level. Advisory boards allow more specific analysis about police misconduct per department — which sidesteps the overgeneralization lawmakers often make about police brutality, which assumes all departments interact with their citizens in exactly the same fashion.

Moreover, the bill’s demand for increased diversity among law enforcement addresses the mounting representation problem within California’s police departments that enables police brutality. While in other parts of the country disparate racial differences can be seen in white and black populations — Ferguson’s police force was 55 percent more white than its residents according to The New York Times — Los Angeles’s story is mostly between white and brown populations. In Montclair, for example, the police department is 69 percent more white than its mainly Hispanic residents — so the racial disparity is actually higher than it is in Ferguson. And though the gap is between white and Hispanic people, the power dynamic, and the racial profiling that follows, remains similar.

But perhaps the most surprising part about AB 953 is its comprehensiveness. In updating the definition of identity profiling to include gender and sexual orientation, the bill encourages intersectional change that highlights injustices not only to people of color, but to women and those who do not identify as heterosexual. This addition suggests that the bill is not, in fact, a temporary solution in response to nationwide publicity of the mistreatment of black and brown people, but rather a legitimate effort to more correctly enact justice toward marginalized populations.

Since the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, I have been filled with outrage, anger, exasperation and fatigue at the civilians who have died day after day at the hands of the police — and whose deaths are largely publicized — while the government stands idly by. Having gone through the cycle of emotions so many times, the feelings eventually cascaded into numbness, and it’s almost as if I’ve been desensitized to brutality against innocent citizens. Many politicians have condemned police aggression and mourned those lost, but these words have felt largely empty.

But for the first time, I have hope that palpable, large-scale, institutional reform is possible in California. Of course, AB 953 is not the end-all to the issue of police brutality in our state, but it could be the first pen stroke that begins a novel of greater change. Regardless, an observant, and deeply suspicious, population will be closely following the evolution — or lack thereof — in California’s law enforcement. It is, perhaps, good to be a skeptic, but as of now, it is even better to be an optimist.

Sonali Seth is a sophomore majoring in political science and policy, planning and development. She is also the editorial director of the Daily Trojan. “Point/Counterpoint” runs Mondays.