Joe Biden has announced that he will be appointing Xavier Becerra as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
I did not expect this, given Becerra's support for Medicare for All, so it's a win on a policy level.
Additionally, it's a win, because it means that Becerra will no longer be California Attorney General, where he has been a dedicated fluffer to bad cops and cop unions: (See also here, and here)
In his two years on the job, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra has crafted an image as a progressive warrior, suing the Trump Administration dozens of times and delivering the Democrats’ Spanish-language rebuttal to the President’s State of the Union speech.
But there’s one major area where the Democrat isn’t allied with progressives: accountability for law enforcement. There, Becerra is at odds with the push by many in his own party to better police the police.
The attorney general is refusing to provide records on police misconduct that media outlets requested under a new law signed last year by Democratic former Gov. Jerry Brown. The legislator who wrote the law, also a Democrat, says the documents must be disclosed. But Becerra has sided with police who want the courts to weigh in before releasing records about officers who were involved in shootings, sexual assault or lying on the job.
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Numerous police unions have filed lawsuits in recent weeks to try to block their departments from releasing misconduct records under the new law, Senate Bill 1421, which took effect on Jan. 1. The officers argue that the law only applies to records created on or after Jan. 1, while the legislator who wrote the law says it applies to any records in the police departments’ possession, including those from past years.
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The records they released, all of abuses that were confirmed by internal investigations, showed one officer was fired after he offered to help a woman deal with drunk-driving charges if she had sex with him. In another case, an on-duty police officer had sex with a member of the public. Numerous other officers were dishonest or used force that resulted in severe injuries. It was the first time in many decades that such information has been made public in California, which has had one of the nation’s most restrictive police records laws.A broad coalition of media outlets have been requesting misconduct records from law enforcement agencies big and small since the new law took effect at the start of the year. Some agencies have complied—including police departments in Fairfield, Rio Vista and Burlingame.
The records they released, all of abuses that were confirmed by internal investigations, showed one officer was fired after he offered to help a woman deal with drunk-driving charges if she had sex with him. In another case, an on-duty police officer had sex with a member of the public. Numerous other officers were dishonest or used force that resulted in severe injuries. It was the first time in many decades that such information has been made public in California, which has had one of the nation’s most restrictive police records laws.
Becerra refused to disclose any misconduct records regarding officers employed by the state Department of Justice. Then the free-speech nonprofit, the First Amendment Coalition, sued him, arguing that his refusal has had a ripple effect, giving “a green light to other departments to disregard the new law.”
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Becerra is not the first California Attorney General to side with police on accountability issues—or to take heat for it from the left. Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, for instance, refused as attorney general to support statewide standards for police body cameras, endorsing instead the law enforcement argument that such rules should be determined at the local level, even if the result was a patchwork. She also opposed a bill to put the state Department of Justice in charge of investigating police shootings.
Becerra has held a similar position on more recent versions of the bill, marking another instance in which he sided with law enforcement against efforts toward greater transparency. Progressive advocates for criminal justice reform argue that the state Department of Justice could be more objective than local prosecutors in determining if shootings are justified, because local prosecutors work so closely with police. Even Becerra’s Republican opponent said the state should be in charge of investigating police shootings.
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Becerra’s office agreed to review the Sacramento Police Department after officers killed an unarmed man in his grandmother’s backyard, but that was only because local officials requested it. And even though his review has made some strong recommendations—including that the Sacramento police should overhaul their use-of-force policies—Becerra stopped short of endorsing a tougher statewide standard to justify police shootings, something progressive Democrats are fighting for this year.
Hopefully, the next California AG will not be so beholden to crooked cops.
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