At our September 14th meeting we reviewed the PrOTECT ordinance regarding traffic stops, which the Coalition for Police Accountability and Transparency (CPAT) coalition is trying to get the San Diego City Council to pass. We’d like our members to sign the petition, asking the City Council to pass it as written, not a watered-down version.
LWVSD and LWVNCSD sent a letter to the County along with Chula Vista and the City of San Diego, encouraging them to enact surveillance technology-use ordinances. As we learn more about the situations of the other large cities in the county, others may receive it as well.
We have asked the District Attorney’s Office to reply to the Racial Justice Coalition’s “Prosecute or Resign” campaign. We have heard from RJCSD but want to hear the other side’s explanation before deciding whether to support that campaign. We had a deputy DA attend this meeting and will look forward to her helping us in the future. She asked Tanya Sierra from the DA’s Communications Office to respond to the RJC campaign but we had not heard back by the deadline for The Voter.
We also discussed a project that the Sheriff Oversight Interest Group is conducting. Each member of that group researched five counties and put our results in a very large spreadsheet. We are recording whether the sheriff is a female, whether the coroner is part of the sheriff’s duties, their “Use of Force” training and implementation, whether they have an oversight board, their relationship with ICE, California's Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA), and how they have gone about realignment as they took in prisoners from state prisons. It is a big undertaking but it should be worthwhile to see the similarities and differences between counties, big and small. So far from San Diego County, Jennifer White from LWVNCSD and Jeanne Brown from LWVSD are doing the research, but we would like to have others join us.
Four members of our committee visited the misdemeanor court under the guidance of committee member Stephanie Sontag, retired judge of the San Diego Superior Court. The visit was arranged after Jeanne Brown, committee chair, brought attention to a growing concern that misdemeanors can have a profoundly harmful effect on people’s lives, burdening them with fines and fees that are difficult to pay and criminal records that take years to expunge. The field trip gave committee members a first-hand view of how misdemeanors are handled in our local court. Judge Belsky, who presided over several cases involving the entry of pleas, change of pleas, arraignments, and sentencing, spent some time with us to explain his work. He shared a copy of the Sentencing Guidelines that judges follow in weighing factors that influence sentencing. Defendants appeared either in person or virtually from the jail. Several defendants failed to appear and bench warrants were issued. After our visit, Stephanie answered members’ questions about the court process and the difficulties judges face in sentencing. The committee is considering a visit to one of our county jails.
You do not need to be a member of the Criminal Justice Committee to attend our meetings, which are still on Zoom, although we are hoping to have one in person, perhaps a hybrid of in-person and virtual.