Growing up in San Francisco, Michelle Monterrosa remembers attending protests against police brutality with her brother, Sean.
The names of people like Oscar Grant, Mario Woods and Alex Nieto — all young men of color killed by Bay Area police officers — were burned into her memory.
But years later, she said, “This fight became personal when our brother was murdered.”
On June 2, 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Sean Monterrosa was fatally shot by Vallejo Police Officer Jarrett Tonn, who fired at the kneeling 22-year-old through the windshield of an unmarked police pickup truck in a Walgreens parking lot.
Monterrosa's family later found out that Tonn had been involved in three other shooting incidents since 2015. The Solano County District Attorney's Office declined to bring charges against the officer. Recently, however, newly appointed California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced the state’s Department of Justice would conduct its own investigation into the shooting.
But most criminal investigations move at a snail’s pace, and so families of people who have been killed by police are now pursuing another path toward justice. Senate Bill 2, introduced late last year, would bar police officers convicted of serious misconduct from being rehired by other departments or agencies — essentially stripping badges from bad officers.
Advocates argue the bill's premise is hardly outlandish: In California, doctors, lawyers and even barbers can lose their professional licenses for certain major violations. But there’s currently no equivalent recourse for police.
“We need to build a pathway where we can remove dangerous police officers from our communities,” said Michelle Monterrosa. “Because at the end of the day, our loved ones are unfortunately just counting down the days until they become the next hashtag. So this bill is long overdue.”
State Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, who introduced SB 2, wrote a similar bill last year that didn’t make it out of the state Assembly; it was one of several state police reform bills that died over the summer, even as the nation was rocked by racial justice protests sparked by Floyd's murder.
California is one of just four states that does not have any process to decertify police officers, allowing some officers convicted of serious misconduct to leave their departments and be rehired at other law enforcement agencies. Sometimes officers simply resign in the middle of their internal investigations, then apply for another job in a different jurisdiction.