Al Sharpton Pushes State Lawmakers to Renew Focus on Police Reforms

The Rev. Al Sharpton met with California lawmakers on Tuesday and urged legislators to pick up their effort on police reforms, which civil rights leaders say have slipped this session.

Sharpton and local leaders of his National Action Network were at the Capitol to lobby in favor of AB 284, which would give local police and district attorneys the ability to ask the state attorney general's office to investigate police shootings.

The group left a meeting with Assembly Appropriations Chairwoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) hopeful that the bill would clear her committee's suspense file on Friday, which is the deadline for spending bills to advance to the floor.

"It has become clear to us that local prosecutors are compromised in their investigations," said Sharpton. "They depend on police unions to endorse their elections. And they depend on local police to do the investigations of crimes."

AB 284 has faced opposition from law enforcement groups who say the bill duplicates existing oversight.

"The attorney general retains the authority to step in on any criminal prosecution when they think there’s a problem," said Cory Salzillo of the California State Sheriffs' Association at a hearing last month. "There are other things the AG should be working on, rather than investigating these cases based on this notion of bias on the part of the district attorney."

Last legislative session, lawmakers pushed proposals to expedite the release of body-camera footage, and even open up officers' personnel records. Civil rights leaders worry that this session, California lawmakers are losing momentum on policing reforms.

"This is one of the issues that California must lead on," said the Rev. Shane Harris, president of the National Action Network San Diego. "We are supposedly leading the nation in being progressive, yet still we are failing on a very big issue nationally that Democrats have vowed to take on."

In Connecticut, an individual outside of the local prosecutor's office can be appointed to investigate an officer's use of deadly force. And in Wisconsin, incidents in which an officer is involved with a civilian's death must be investigated by an independent review panel.

Two years ago, Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento), who authored AB 284, carried a more ambitious police reform proposal that would have required a special prosecutor to investigate any deadly officer-involved shooting in the state. That legislation died in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

This new proposal, which received bipartisan support in committee, would bring in the attorney general's office to look into a police shooting only upon request of a local agency.