Assembly Standing Committee on Public Safety

Good morning. Welcome to California State Assembly Public Safety Committee. We're going to begin as a Subcommitee until we get to a quorum first. Like to read. All witness testimony will be in person. There will be no phone testimony upon option for this hearing. You can find more information at www.Assembly.CA/govcommittees. We'll begin the Subcommitee. First up is. zero, I'm sorry, I have some housekeeping. Very important housekeeping off calendar. Item number two, AB455. Quirk Silva, been pulled by the author.

Item number three, AB523. Vince Fong pulled by the author. Item number four, AB667. Maienschein, pulled by the author. Item number five, AB695. Pacheco, pulled by Committee. Item number 13, AB763. Davies, pulled by the author. Item number 16, AB, eight. Mathis, pulled by the author. Item number 26, AB977. Rodriguez, pulled by the author. Item 29, AB 1047. Maienschein, pulled by the author. And we'll begin with our. I believe I don't have my notes, Mr. Sergeant. Need to know who's first up.

First on here I have Mr. Evan Low, AB 1064, item number 30. Mr. Low.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair and Committee Members. I understand that this bill does enjoy a do pass recommendation on both sides of the aisle. And if you'll allow me an opportunity to present and say a little bit about this bill. This is Assembly Bill 1064, which defines bias against within hate crimes and addresses the selective discriminatory targeting of victims.

Specifically, this bill seeks to allow the charge of a hate crime to simply be brought before a jury, and the jury will then be able to decide with the evidence presented if the defendant is guilty of a hate crime. This has been an issue that we've seen that has been pervasive in a number of areas in the State of California. This is also an API Legislative caucus priority with respect to hate crimes and respectfully ask for your aye vote when you have established a quorum

With me today in support is Jay Barwski, Chief Assistant District Attorney for the County of Santa Clara, District Attorney Jeff Rosen's Office, as well as Charles Jung, Executive Director of the California Asian American Bar Association.

You have five minutes total, whichever way you want to split it up.

Yeah, please go ahead.

Good morning, Chairman. It's wonderful to be in front of your Committee again. Jeff Rosen sends his regrets. It's my good fortune that I get to be here. He's in Israel this week, but he sends his regards to you.

Tell him I said hi.

I will do so. It is a privilege to be here, along with Assembly Member Low in support of this small but very needed and significant piece of legislation which will allow us to continue to give meaning to the hate crime statutes which this Legislature has so continuously supported over the years. The issue, as Assembly Member Low spoke about, is when we have a perpetrator targeting victims for hate crimes exclusively because they are members of a protected race, gender, religion, ethnicity.

And I note what I know the Chairman knows is who can commit a hate crime? Anyone is capable. Who can be the victim of a hate crime? Anyone can be the victim of a hate crime. In prosecuting hate crimes, which I've done for almost 30 years now in Jeff Rosen's DA's office, we occasionally run into some obstacles with jury instructions or certain elements.

We've seen an epidemic of anti-AAPI hate crime in recent years where some of the perpetrators will only target several different members, all Asian, but they may not yell out a racial slur. They may not say any of the hateful things that we've heard from some of our other leaders saying. And without that explicit evidence, some prosecutors are hesitant to bring the hate crime forward, even though they've only targeted 10 Chinese people or 15 South Asian grandmothers wearing saris.

What this bill attempts to do is just to make clear for the judiciary that if someone selectively targets a group of people because of their membership in a protected class, that should be able to be considered a hate crime. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Jones-Sawyer and Members of the Committee. Appreciate the work that you do very much. My name is Charles Jung. I'm the Executive Director of the California Asian Pacific American Bar Association. We represent the interests of 23 sister bar organizations across the state and California's roughly 14,000 APA attorneys. Last Thursday, I had the privilege of organizing the second anniversary commemoration of the Atlanta spa shootings.

And there we heard for the first time from the father of Michelle Goh, who was the young woman in New York City who was targeted, pushed off the train platform and into the path of an oncoming train. One of our speakers in our Atlanta event was Robert Peterson. Robert Peterson is the proud younger son of a Korean mother and a African American veteran, and his mother was Yu Young, one of the eight victims of the Atlanta spa shooting.

What this measure does is it clarifies existing law, making the definition of hate crimes consistent with how it's interpreted in the courts as it is. And in addition, it makes clear that discriminatory selection of victims also qualifies under the statute.

Many of us have heard of the Atlanta spa shootings, but one thing that's not well known is that Robert Long had to travel over 27 miles between the site of the first shooting to the second shooting, from an unincorporated area of Cherokee County in Georgia to a region in Atlanta.

I remember very clearly when I turned on the news and heard a sheriff's deputy grab the mic and make excuses for Robert Long, saying that he was having a bad day and suggesting that he had a sex addiction. And because this was a sex addiction, that implicitly that this was not a hate crime. Robert Long traveled those 27 miles, and he selectively targeted three establishments that were owned and employed by Asian American workers, Asian American women.

And along the way, along those 27 miles, he passed by strip clubs, other establishments that were not owned by Asian Americans. And so one last thing that I'll say is, in organizing these events in San Francisco and around the country, one thing I hear persistently is frustration from the Asian American community. Why, when Asian Americans are discriminatorily selected for crimes, why is that not also classified as a hate crime? And that's what AB 1064 addresses. Thank you.

Thank you. Allow us, Mr. Low. I think we have enough to establish a quorum and then we'll do the consent calendar and then I'll call for witnesses and support. That way we can get dispensed with it. So could you call the roll?

Of course. [Roll Call]

A quorum is present on the consent calendar. We have item number six, AB 697, Davies, Drug Court Success Incentive Pilot Program. Item number eight, AB 724, Vince Fong, firearms safety certificate instructional materials. Item number 11, AB 751, Shiavo, elder abuse. Item number 24, AB 943, Kalra, corrections population data. Item number 28, AB 997, Gipson, exoneration mental health services. Item number 31, AB 1080, Ta, criminal justice realignment. I need a motion to approve the consent calendar. Call the roll.

On the consent calendar. [Roll Call]

The consent calendar is adopted and I'll return. For anyone in the audience in favor of AB 1064, Low, you can come to the microphone. Name and organization please.

Greg DeGiere representing the Arc and United Cerebral Palsy California Collaboration, and we support the bill.

Eric Harris with Disability Rights California in support.

Thank you.

Catalina Zambrano, Ramos, Familia, y Central in support.

Thank you.

Kim Stone, Stone Advocacy on behalf of the California District Attorneys Association in support.

Thank you.

Good morning. Simone Reyes, Central California LGBTQ Collaborative in support of.

Thank you.

Christophe Mayer, American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees in support. Thank you.

Thank you. Now, are there any witnesses in opposition? Any witnesses in opposition? You have five minutes.

Thank you. Is this on?

Yes, it is. Okay, let's get closer to the mic so we can hear you.

Okay. Good morning, everyone. My name is Alice Michael, and I am here on behalf of the California Public Defenders Association. I've been a public defender for 25 years. We are opposed to this bill. I want to make very clear at the outset that we are not opposed to this bill because we are opposed to legislation against hate crimes. Obviously, our members are very concerned about hate crimes. We have many members who are parts of protected classes.

We are also very concerned about hate crimes against the AAPI community and the proliferation of those crimes at this time Our concern with this bill is simply that the language defining bias motivation, we believe, is incredibly over-broad. This bill, I believe, was intended to target people who commit crimes against protected classes exclusively because of their membership of that protected class, and we support that idea.

However, the way that the language in this statute is worded, it would include many crimes where the motivation is not that the person is a member of a protected class. And I talked specifically about the definition contained within about bias motivation. So an example of what could be a biased motivation is picking a victim based on the perception that that victim is vulnerable because they are weak. The reality is, many victims of violence or theft crimes are picked because of vulnerability.

This bill could, as written, could include any crime against a woman if it's arguable that she was targeted because she was perceived as being part of the weaker sex, including a purse snatching, or a business robbery where the person focuses on the female employee. It also could include any crime against an elderly person who is disabled because of their age, a pickpocket, a theft of their property because they're less able to be able to chase or fight back with the person committing the crime.

Fraud crimes against elderly people. Another motivation that it includes as constituting a hate crime is if the motivation is thrill seeking, which could include a young person who takes a car from a member of a protected class to joyride, someone who puts graffiti on a business, regardless of the content that's owned by a member of the protected class, somebody who recklessly drives and injures somebody who's part of a protected class.

These are not crimes that would be motivated exclusively because the person is part of a protected class. But under this bill, they would be able to be prosecuted as hate crimes. Another of the motivations included in the bill is a person if they're motivated by a desire for social bonding, this could end up being used against every gang member who commits a crime against a different gang where the members are of a different ethnicity.

Again, we support the idea of defining hate crimes for those crimes in which the victim is chosen exclusively because they're a member of a protected class. But we believe that this bill is overly broad and would end up in a large increase in incarceration of many people. Thank you.

Thank you. Are there any other witnesses in opposition? Seeing none. We'll bring it back to Committee Members for any questions or comments. Seeing none. I'm not trying to force anybody to see anything.

I'm reading the language here. This is about hate crimes that are motivated in whole, in part, by a bias against one or more of the following or actual perceived characteristics of the victim, which includes disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or an association with a group. I don't see how any of the examples given by the last witness apply, given the language of the bill.

So you just look at the language of the bill, and it is about hate crimes based on one of those characteristics. So I don't find the last testimony persuasive, and we'll be voting for the bill.

Thank you.

I say move the bill.

We have a motion. Is there a second? There's no more. You may close or you may use Mr. Zbur as your closing.

I just want to acknowledge the hard work of the Committee staff to also address the issues at hand, too, and making it the product before us. And I respectfully ask for an aye vote.

Okay. Did you want them to comment? I'm sorry, we're done.

Yes, I respect.

Call the roll.

On item 1064 by Assembly Member Low. The motion is do pass as amended to the Appropriations Committee. [Roll Call]

That measure passes. Thank you. Treetop, AB 329. Item number one, theft jurisdiction. Whenever you're ready, you can begin.

Yes, I'm ready. So thank you, Mr. Chair and Members of this Committee, AB 329 specifically authorized the Attorney General to prosecute multiple offenses of cargo theft that spend more than one county and involve the same defendant. The Bill from the jurisdiction of the Attorney General to consolidate Montagargo theft crime into a prosecution in one county. This Bill Mirror AB 1613 with worse related two retail theft that this Committee passed unanimously last year.

AB 329 extend exact same revision to multi juridicinal cargo theft that will afford two retail theft over the past decade, the cost of cargo theft related crime has risen dramatically. It is estimate that combined losses suffered by the trucking industry, insurance companies and railroad surpassed $10 billion in the US annually. Cargo theft is distinctly different from retail theft and that is covered under a different section of the penal code. It deal with goods that are in transit to warehouse or factories.

Retail theft deal specifically with goods that are currently for sale. AB 329 would access California businesses frustrated with cargo theft impact. AB 329 would give a tool to the Attorney General to stop this often organize an sophisticated crime that is destroying our California businesses. It is my understanding that the lease opposition was for the regious version of the Bill. So I humbly ask for your aye vote. and I'd like to now present Nick Chappie with the California Truck Association.

Thank you. You have five minutes.

Good morning. Chair Jones Sawyer and Members Nick Chappie with the California Trucking Association in support cargo theft is a serious problem that has been in the rise in recent years. As the Assembly Member mentioned, the National Insurance Crime Bureau and the California Highway Patrol estimate combined losses suffered by shippers, including the trucking industry, surpasses $10 billion in the United States annually. Just last year, the CHP uncovered a major organized cargo theft ring that was stealing electronic shipments from multiple counties throughout the state.

The suspects were found with thousands of stolen items and were responsible for over $9 million in stolen cargo. Similarly, the Attorney General's Office last year charged several suspects with thefts from cargo trucks that had departed from multiple Microsoft shipping facilities, motor carriers, truck drivers and businesses who are victims of organized crime. Organized cargo theft will benefit from extended protections under this Bill. AB 329 will also take the necessary steps toward protecting consumers who rely on the safe and efficient transportation of goods. For these reasons, we support AB 329 and appreciate the Assembly Member for his leadership on this issue. Thank you.

Thank you. Are there any other witnesses in support? Any other witnesses in support? Any witnesses in opposition?

Lesli Caldwell Houston for the California Public Defenders Association I don't know if our letter got in in time. We are withdrawing our opposition.

Danica Rodarmel , on behalf of Initiate Justice and opposition.

Tom Tran, on behalf of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and we oppose.

Melanie Kim, on behalf of the San Francisco Public Defender's office in opposition.

Thank you. And now we'll bring it back to the Committee for any comments or questions. Mr. Lackey?

Yeah. I'd just like to commend Assemblymember Ta for bringing this bill to our attention. In LA County, there's been a massive amount of rail theft that's caused some of the companies to redirect their route instead of through Los Angeles.

There was so much trash associated with this theft that it even caused some train crashes. The companies have hired private security and rerouted their trains, as I just mentioned, due to lack of enforcement by the local District Attorney.

Rail theft is altogether much different than retail theft, as was outlined by the Assemblymember. And this clearly deserves our support, and so I'll be supporting it. Thank you.

Thank you. Comments or statements? Seeing none, you may close.

I really want to thanks the work of all the Committee staff, and I humbly ask for your aye vote.

Think there may be some. I don't know if there's confusion, because I'm reading the Attorney General currently has the authority to prosecute cargo theft. And I think even in my District Attorney Gascon, in response, you'd like we conduct a thorough review when appropriate.

They do file charges on felonies and misdemeanors. So I don't know if this is a clarification with the jurisdictions, and maybe that's something we can work on so that we're not doing something that's already there. Duplicative.

I'm going to recommend a note so that we can get to a place where we can have clarity on jurisdictional. But I don't believe the Attorney General would just not do anything. I have full faith that if there is a problem, they would take care of it. Is there a motion?

A motion.

Second.

Call for the roll.

On AB 329 by Assemblymember Todd. The motion is do pass.

[Roll Call]

Committee fails, but come back and let's talk about ways we can clarify this for the trucking industry and the cargo and you united part.

Thank you.

He has to ask.

Okay. Yes. Consideration, please.

Okay, I'm going to try this. Should we take a vote, or can I say unanimous? If there's no objection, by unanimous consent, we will grant reconsideration. You have it.

Thank you.

Mr. Corey Jackson with three bills, AB 742. AB 855. AB 994.

Mr. Chair, Members of the Committee, thank you so much. I have three bills before you. I will start with AB 855.

Fine, Fees, Assessments, whenever you're ready.

AB 855 would change the annual interest rate on restitution orders and the annual interest rate on certain delinquent payments, including fines, fees, and restitution, to no more than 1%. Today, when a convicted defendant who caused harm is ordered to pay restitution, they do so at a rate of 10%. As this interest accrues and fees are levied, the restitution debt owed can balloon by thousands of dollars, making it highly unlikely victims will be re-compensated for their suffered loss.

The vast majority of people in the system are low-income and will never be able to pay off their restitution debt. But according to the UC Berkeley Law School policy advocacy clinic, 67% of survivors do not receive any restitution payment, and only 13% of restitution is ever collected, as most do not have a way to pay. Unlike other debt, restitution has no statute of limitations and is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

To get payments, courts often resort to involuntary collection actions, including garnishing wages and intercepting tax refunds. Because of the targeted policing and over-punishment of communities of color, black and brown, Californians are overrepresented in the legal system across the state. For example, in Los Angeles County, black individuals account for 20% of all restitution ordered, but only 8% of the county's total population. Onerous restitution fines and fees fail to be restorative and turn our system into being even more regressive and literally serving no one.

AB 855 seeks to better recompense victims and provide the relief they deserve. If we truly want restorative justice in California, we must create and build our system to meet these goals, especially when we know they are being missed. We cannot ask our formerly incarcerated to build themselves up and thrive if we set them up to fail. We also cannot ask victims to receive justice if the system fails them as well.

AB 855 seeks to put California further down the path of creating a public safety infrastructure truly serving its purpose and all parties involved with me today, I have State Treasurer Fiona Ma, a former distinguished member of this body who I am proud to say serves as the Bill co-sponsor and is here today to speak in support on the Bill and answer any technical questions. Also speaking in support is Andrew Winn, Executive Director of Insight Garden Programs, to provide us his testimony of paying restitution.

So you have five minutes. But of course, as a statewide officer, you have some constitutional.

Don't worry, I'll be short of that. Thank you. Thank you, Members. When I was here in the Legislature from 2006 to 2012, I also served on the Public Safety Committee for four years. And it was one of my most fascinating committees because you don't know how you're going to vote sometimes until you hear all the testimony. My last two bills signed by Governor Brown allowed women convicted of life without parole to have a second chance at getting their cases heard. Many of them are serving 30-45 years in jail, serious health issues.

And so this has made a difference in their lives, where they are able to live the rest of their lives outside of the prison walls. But it has enabled me to learn a lot about some of the problems that are happening inside. So I am proud to co sponsor this Bill. Because the 10% is punitive, right? It starts two weeks after conviction. The interest continues to accrue whether the inmates are in prison.

They don't have a lot of opportunities to earn a lot of money, and then if they miss a payment, they are assessed a 10% penalty on top of that. So when they finally get out of prison, the amount of debt that they are owed for the victims compensation Fund is pretty much out of reach. And many of them are going to have to continue to have this debt over their heads. Like the Assembly Member said, it is not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

It stays on their record for life. And this is not giving the inmate an opportunity to right their wrongs. It's not giving victims families that payment that they deserve. And so this whole system is extremely punitive. And I think having a 1% interest rate is fair.

It gives people a skin in the game, but it doesn't overwhelm them and create additional recidivism and individuals who are trying to reenter gives them a chance to pay back, but also be able to create some sort of practical life, quality of life, after they get out of prison. So I'm very honored to be here and thank the Assembly Member for carrying this important Bill.

Thank you.

Good morning. Thank you for having me. My name is Andrew Winn. Just as the Member introduced me, I'm the Executive Director of the Insight Garden Program. We provide rehabilitative programming inside prison and reentry services for the people we serve. I myself am previously incarcerated. I served prison sentence here in California. I paroled in 2009. I was given a $23,000 restitution Bill, and when I got out, it was ballooned to around 27 or $28,000. I paroled homeless in 2009.

So just to even come with that kind of debt right out the gates was really just difficult. I struggled with getting employed. I didn't have a living wage till just a few years ago, so just to kind of bring it to perspective, and in 2015, I attended UCLA, and at that time, I showed the greatest financial aid need. I was a Pell Grant recipient. I had a work study job. I was also President, graduate family housing, where I earned a stipend.

But I still was barely making it as somebody living in Los Angeles, on the west side of Los Angeles, where it's very expensive. Yeah. None of that really allowed me to just one save or even pay back. And it wasn't until 2016 my bank account was levied. I received my financial aid payment a few weeks before that, and they took all my financial aid money, and I was there trying to figure out myself. But beyond just taking my financial aid money, it really personally impacted me.

It took away just myself. It put me in a suicidal state. I'm not a person who constantly goes through a suicidal state. Matter of fact, that's the only time I've gone through one, so it cut me deep as a person with a family, I couldn't take care of them as a primary provider. I just couldn't do much right. It just took away a good piece of my identity as just a person.

I had to negotiate to try to get some of my funding back, despite it being federal money, state money, and work study money. I just had to negotiate with the state Franchise Tax Board, and in that process, they couldn't understand how the student had more expenses than they had income. And if any of you have gone to college in California, we know that's a very common occurrence.

So I had to explain how I used credit card debt to get by every month, and it caused me just tremendous stress and pain. I was unable to pay my rent to the UC regents as a result of, you know, I had to just negotiate a payment plan. Luckily, at the time of my low, where I was thinking of suicide, I did have a Professor who was there for me during that time and helped me get through it. His name is Bryonn Bain.

But even to this day, since 2016, I continue to make those monthly payments as a result of that levy. However, the amount has not gone down. I'm still making payments on it, even from in prison, when they were garnishing more than half of my eight an hour job inside. So, I mean, here I am, still with his debt, and here we are several years later, me making continuous on time payments. Thank you.

Thank you. Are there any other witnesses in support?

Danica Rodarmel, on behalf of Initiate Justice, in support.

Thank you.

Leslie Caldwell Houston, for the California Public Defenders Association, in support.

Lizzie Buchen, with the Prosecutors Alliance of California, in support.

Tom Tran, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, in support.

John Vasquez, on behalf of Communities United for Restorative Justice, in support.

Espan Nunez, with the Anti Recidivism Coalition, a proud co-sponsor of this Bill, in support.

Jim Lindbergh, Friends Committee on Legislation of California, in support.

Hedoni Morgilad, on behalf of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, in strong support.

Annalisa Ruiz, with Young Women's Freedom Center, in strong support.

Thank you. Now there are any witnesses and opposition.

Good morning.

Good morning. Welcome.

Thank you. My name is Gretchen Lichtenberger and I'm here as Legislative Chairperson for the California Association of Judgment Professionals, and we are in opposition to this Bill. I have been enforcing court judgments for almost, almost two decades now. And I could tell you story after story after story from the victim's perspective, and one important one was in Santa Barbara, very high-profile case.

This unscrupulous woman stole money from three nuns in Santa Barbara that were trying to find housing because they were putting out, being put out of their home, their 50 year home by the archdiocese. And she got arrested for that. And she was standing trial while she was out on bail. She made friends with a couple of the parishioners of the nuns, and then she committed financial elder abuse against them and they lost their home. She took over $40,000 from them while she was out on bail.

She got arrested for that and she ultimately got sentenced to 11 years in jail. These victims that were parishioners of the nuns, and this was a very highly publicized story in Santa Barbara. These victims were in their late 70s. They lost their house because she was supposed to be doing a mortgage modification for them and she didn't. And they lost their house. They had nowhere to go. They were homeless because she took advantage of them. I have a client who was hit by a drunk driver.

She's paralyzed, she's in a wheelchair. She has a huge amount of medical bills that she had because of that. And she was probably never going to get all of her money paid back to her. But the purpose of victim restitution is to fully compensate the victim for their loss of use of money. I bonds right now are paying about 8% and CDS are paying about 5% or 6%. And it was said here today that this is part of restorative justice and that the 10% is punitive.

The reason Legislature set it at 10% is because it has two purposes. One is to fully compensate the creditor for their loss of use of their money, and two, to encourage the debtor that owes the money to pay the judgment. If this interest is set at 1%, why would they ever pay anything? And if people truly are at a place in their life where they can't afford to pay the judgment, the principal amount of the judgment, what difference does it make about the interest rate?

So I present to you that it doesn't make sense to reward people that have been committed of crimes. No disrespect to criminals or people that have been committed of crimes, whether or not they were in fact guilty. But think about the victims for a minute. Put yourself in the place of the victim. You have nobody unless you hire a lawyer and pay more money, you have nobody to go and get the enforcement of that order.

That order is enforced by the District Attorney who is short staff and highly overworked and they don't have time to go and collect victim restitution orders. So it's very difficult. Victim restitution orders are probably the least collected judgments in all of California. So it's really important that you don't paint with a broad brush. You don't say all restitution orders get lowered to 1%. Because I can tell you, I've been doing this for almost two decades.

There are plenty of white collar criminals that can afford to pay the 10%. So I look forward to working with the author and the sponsors to come up with something that can be worked for all those people that are involved on both sides. Thank you. Please don't further victimize the crime victims.

Are there any other witnesses in opposition? Seeing none will bring it back to Committee Members for any questions or comments. Mr. Lackey?

Yes. Thank you for the opposition because once again we have another example of over-obsession with the focus and imbalanced focus on offenders and once again showing an insensitivity to victims and how these criminal offenses are long-lasting. Are long, long lasting. And one of the little elements that we've provided to do some kind of, we talk about restorative justice.

How about restorative justice to victims? That would be something that we would all agree on and we need to work more collaboratively together on. But this is not a good example of what needs to be done because victims are already behind the eight ball and I think it's getting tiresome. Thank you. Thank you. Sure.

With the opposition. Did you guys have any kind of payment plans that come up originally the gentleman here said that finally he got to a payment plan. Is there not like a payment plan started from the beginning so they don't fall behind right away?

Yes, I could speak to that. And thank you for your question. It's a very important question. What usually happens in all these different laws is people want to come in and put in all these handcuffs later on. As a creditor who's been doing this for a very long time, we creditors are always open to communication. But what happens is the debtors don't want to communicate. We send letters. We don't harass people at all. We open up the line of communication. We're always open to listen.

We're always open to be reasonable. And many, many times we settle judgments for way less than the face value just to get them off our books. So a lot of times, these debtors, if they would just take the opportunity to reach out to their creditors, it goes a long, long way. So thank you for that question. Yes.

And if I may again, Chair, sir, do you feel like you have that opportunity? Do you think there's something maybe the author of this Bill can maybe work on to make that an easier or a better option? I mean, one, when I paroled homeless, I was housing secure, and so being able to get in contact with me was very much a challenge.

And then when you leave prison, they don't provide you with any kind of information regarding any of the restitution other than what you had paid 55% to at working. So there was no communication that I received, and if I received it, it may have been at a former address, but the instability of being on parole really made it difficult for me to be able to receive that information.

Okay. And for the author, would you maybe think of maybe the consumer price index rate as well? Maybe not so 10, not so much one. But whatever the going rate is at the time,

We're talking about what us as a system and government put on top of that, which then makes it harder for them to pay the victims in the first place. So this is not us being lenient on those who harm somebody. This is us making it easier for the person who does the harm to actually give the restitution directly to the victim themselves. So I believe this is a balanced approach. I believe that this is not a theoretical Bill. This is not a gotcha Bill.

This is a Bill that says the data shows. Right? Don't argue with me. Argue with the data. The data shows that because the 10% is so onerous, nobody gets what they are supposed to, they're supposed to receive. Right. And so this is a way to make sure that victims are actually given or receive the relief that they deserve as victims as well. So thank you very much for that question.

And then you can add the 10% penalty for non payment on top of that. So that's actually 20% on the victim's restitution Fund. So nobody wins in this situation.

There's not a 10% on the victim's order. That's only.

Okay. No.

I just wanted to focus in on the 10% and whether or not there's actually. You're trying to correct the wrong of the 10% being set in the first place. Based on the Bill analysis, it's pretty clear that 10% isn't a reference point that we can actually use. And given the fact that we have the state treasurer here, I don't know if you want to comment on how that 10% was set or the irrelevance of that 10%.

Now, in light of our current savings that someone can receive on any money. And then secondarily, your point around the principal amount still going to the victim, the interest overage, who does that go to?

So just like legislation, right, we pass and we put a number in it. And so normally, we would create a certain amount of administrative fee that goes to the program, and then perhaps like an interest that would accrue to perhaps put back into a Fund for others. Right. The 10% was created through statute. That's what prior legislators voted on and prior governors. So that is what's been in the statute.

So that's what we're trying to correct here, is trying to make the victims whole, but not put such a tremendous amount of burden on the person that was incarcerated so that they can get their life back, they can get a job, they can continue to pay. I mean, that's like taking a loan, right, credit card loan, and you have to pay 18%, right. A lot of people can't pay that back, and then they just get into trouble and bankruptcies as well.

And even during COVID the Federal Government suspended student loan payments for two years. These payments were never suspended for any of them. So it's been accruing for everybody who has to pay that 10% with no delay in the payment, even through Covid. So there's just a lot of inequities in this 10% in the amount that incarcerated folks are being treated. But again, like the Assembly Members said, the victims are still going to be paid in whole.

In theory, we're not reducing the victims compensation Fund or that the money that goes to victims, it's just the punitive 10%, plus an additional penalty of 10%, potentially that's going to be added on top of it.

I second moving the Bill. This is a really thoughtful and great Bill, and I want to thank your witnesses for coming and testifying before the Committee and for sharing such a powerful, honest, lived experience. We should not continue to punish and criminalize poverty. Victims are going to be made whole on their full restitution. That's due, particularly if people who are formerly incarcerated are able to make their payments right.

Mr. Bryan.

The second we put you in a State of losing your housing stability, losing your education stability, nobody is made whole, including society as a whole, because we have to deal with those simultaneous crises that we've caused. If you're looking for co-authors, I'm happy to join you. This is a great idea.

Thank you. You may close.

Not only are we trying to make sure that the victims are made whole, we're also trying to correct the problems that many times our institutions do to incarcerated people. We ask them to go out and be productive members of society, to pick themselves up by their bootstraps. But unfortunately, we create additional penalties that don't give them the opportunity to buy boots in the first place.

And so we have got to do better to making sure that people who are formally incarcerated have a path to upward mobility. And with that, I ask for an aye vote.

And I've had similar bills like this before, so I thank you for bringing this. Not to give the state treasurer a heart attack. One of the things I've always thought about is, as we all have credit, whether it's your home, whether it's your credit cards, if we reversed it, that we paid the principal first and the interest last, what effect that would have. And as far as victims are concerned, now we're paying the victims first.

Exactly.

We're actually getting to the victims. And I thought about putting that in your Bill, and I was dragged from that because my first one was, let's eliminate the interest altogether. But then that became problematic, too. So I'm glad you brought this to us. I think this is a good compromise because I probably would have gone a lot further. And so request that the Committee do an aye vote, but also think about reversing it. It'd be the first of the kind. Yes.

On AB 855 Assemblymember Jackson. The motion is do passed to the Revenue and Taxation Committee [Roll Call]

That measure passes.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. And which item you want to do next?

I'm still here, Mr. Chair. Next up is AB 994. AB 994, item number. 20.

Okay, law enforcement social media item 27. Whenever you're ready. Do you have a witness? Are you by yourself?

I'm by myself today. At this time, I want to start by thanking the hard work of the chair and this Committee protecting the privacy rights of every California central to AB 994, and I'm happy to accept the Committee Amendments.

I also want to thank the Legislative LGBTQ caucus for their leadership and prioritizing this important Bill as well as well with our Chair and co-Chair or Vice Chair of the LGBTQ Caucus as co-sponsors, Senator Eggman and Assemblymember Ward, AB 994 will protect our privacy while maintaining public safety.

This Bill will require our sheriffs and police departments to not post any booking photos or mugshots of individuals when arrested on suspicion of committing any crime unless the individual is deemed an imminent risk to others or the public. FA judge orders the release of the individual's image based on an articulated law enforcement interest or there is an exigent circumstance that necessitates the dissemination of the individual's image due to an urgent and legitimate law enforcement interest.

Importantly, in the event of booking event, a booking photo is used. AB 994 will now require the Police Department or sheriff's office to use the name and pronouns provided by the individual. A Police Department or sheriff's office may include other legal names or known aliases of an individual as well, if using the names or aliases will assist in locating or apprehending the individual, reducing or eliminating an imminent threat to an individual or to public safety.

Lastly, that booking photos will need to be taken down off of social media after 14 days of their first posting. AB 994 enhances privacy rights of all people while still providing judges and law enforcement tools to protect the public from imminent harm and danger when mugshots are used, California should be leading the way in protecting privacy and avoiding the archaic practice of being dead-named. Law enforcement has an extensive history of dead naming and misgendering, transgender, gender nonconforming, and intersex individuals on multiple platforms.

Not only can this act strain existing relationships with family and friends, but it can also threaten the individual's life, especially with the exponential increase in anti-LGBTQ plus and anti-trans rhetoric. Indeed, the State of Illinois recently passed a Bill preventing law enforcement agencies from publishing booking photos on their social networking websites, and this February, the Utah State Senate voted unanimously to entirely prohibit police from publicly releasing mugshots until a person has been convicted of a crime.

AB 994 provides further confidence to all people that California cares and will protect who they are as they are. This Bill provides balance, privacy and protection for individuals and the public. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. And any other witnesses in support. Name and organization, please.

Good morning. Lizzy Buchan, Prosecutors Alliance of California in support. Thanks.

Thank you.

Danica Rodarmel, on behalf of Initiate Justice.

Melissa Romero with California's Initiate Justice.

Tom Tran with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

John Vasquez, on behalf of Communities United for Restorative Justice in support. Thank you.

Leslie Caldwell Houston for the California Public Defenders Association in support. Thank you.

Hedoni Morgilad, Policy Analyst with Legal Services for Prisoners With Children, in strong support. Thank you.

Annalisa Ruiz, Policy Director with Young Women's Freedom Center in strong support.

Thank you.

Joanne Scheer, Founder, Felony Murder Elimination Project in strong support.

Thank you. Now our new witnesses in opposition. Mr. Salzillo. Welcome, whenever you're ready.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, Mr. Chairman, members. Corey Salzillo, on behalf of the California State Sheriff's Association and the California Law Enforcement Association of Records Supervisors, respectfully here in opposition to AB 994, the law that's being amended by this Bill was only created in 2021, did not take effect till last year.

This Bill seeks a significant expansion of that Bill that was negotiated, frankly, and that negotiated Bill had very little or no opposition, including from law enforcement, if I recall correctly, once it was negotiated. This Bill rejects much of the limitation that was negotiated into that Bill just two years ago.

The ability to post booking photos while being restricted left the door open for government to balance privacy considerations as well as the interest in communicating with the public about those who are accused of committing serious and violent crimes. This Bill would prevent the posting of booking photos of a person arrested for a violent crime unless very specific and limited conditions exist.

And in attempting to appropriately identify persons as they wish to be identified in the context of this Bill, and notwithstanding the amendments, this Bill says you have to use the name given by the individual, not in the context. Our objection is not in the context of the way in which a person identifies in terms of their name versus their legal name. But there's no express contemplation of a person who gets arrested.

Booking photo is taken, the law enforcement agency intends to post it under the parameters of existing law or this Bill and saying, my name is Mickey Mouse or Joe DiMaggio or fill in the blank. It's not a question of identify differently, and I use a different name than maybe my legal name, but there's no contemplation of how a law enforcement agency would be able to address that situation. So I know that's not the author's intent.

I suspect that can be cleaned up, but it's not in this Bill, and the amendments don't fix it because the amendments only address a situation where using a legal name. And again, that's the distinction between maybe a person who's transitioned has a legal name, hasn't changed a name, that question, not the, I tell you, a completely fake name, or if I get arrested and they're taking my photo and I say my name is mean. So that's. Anyway, so that's more of a technical issue.

But again, because this is so new, because it was just negotiated, we think we got to a comfortable spot last time. This is a massive expansion. For those reasons, we ask for no vote. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other witnesses in opposition?

Good morning, Mr. Chair Members Ryan Sherman with the Riverside Sheriff Association in opposition, as well as the Placer County Deputy Sheriff's Association and the Deputy Sheriff Association of Monterey County. Thank you.

Then we'll bring it back to Committee. Bryan?

What is the efficacy of posting a booking photo for somebody who hasn't yet been formally charged, potentially, or maybe even has, but certainly hasn't been convicted of wrongdoing yet, is clearly just a suspect? And you can still post that we've caught the suspect of X, Y and Z case. What is the efficacy of posting a booking photo at all? And to the Mickey Mouse assertion, I think with the bill's provisions, it allows for you to put legal name and aliases.

I think now if I use the alias Mickey Mouse in instances where you would attribute that to gang affiliation, proven or otherwise, you would put that on the post too, as well. I've seen that in many instances. Right.

And so I'm just wondering what at all is the efficacy of posting a booking photo of somebody who has not been convicted yet, when you could just say that we've caught a suspect in x, Y and Z case, I've also seen many instances where that's been done, where we'd rather just do that than post a booking photo. And it seems kind of arbitrary when the discretion applies. Although I see a lot of Black faces posted.

I can't speak to the distribution in which photos are posted, not, and agencies make those choices. Some agencies post a ton of them, some don't post them at all. The efficacy, I think, is a situation in which a person's been charged or has been booked and that might be a fugitive. I understand existing law in the Bill contemplates an exemption for someone who's a fugitive. But not every fugitive case falls under the Bill. It may not be an exigent circumstance. That's issue number one.

Issue number two is, at the risk of my own peril, answer the question with a question of what is the challenge and what is the propriety of saying, and not to encourage anyone to do a Bill. But I don't think anybody has restricted newspapers from posting booking photos. This is law enforcement and social media. Right? I'm not trying to give you a Bill idea.

To that question. It's certainly not a Bill idea because the government doesn't control the newspapers. Right. Because it is not a public owned entity that also still has collaboration and cooperation with the entity that's also filing charges, booking you, collecting your restitution, all of these things.

Newspapers have a different set of frameworks than the one that we hold our public and civic institutions to. And I would argue the framework that we should hold our law enforcement institutions to. And so, Mr. Jackson, I think this is a thoughtful, smart, good Bill. I see that the fugitive list is on here.

Okay. Any other comments?

If somebody is a fugitive, if we've been looking for Mickey Mouse, Mickey Mouse is a fugitive, and we find him or her or them, they can have their picture posted. And so I don't see a problem there. I think there may be some technical things you still want to address, but you're going to go through many, many committees, and I know you're willing to do that. So thank you for bringing this forward today. I'm going to be happy to support your Bill.

Mr. Chair. I don't think I completely answered the question. Just very briefly, I also want to, I think, point to not only a fugitive issue, but if someone's arrested and booked and they're not a fugitive, they're in custody. Posting that picture may encourage other victims to come forward or may shed light on other cases that might be involved. So I just wanted to add that, and I neglected to say that. Thank you.

I was actually going to make that same comment. I've done that myself, where we've actually found other victims of crimes by posting those pictures to help in another, because some of them just don't come forward, and then they see that person, or they see they're not the only one, and it does find other victims for us. So thank you for pointing that out.

Okay, any other comments? You may close.

I respectfully ask, and aye vote.

The Committee tried to clarify and clean up as best we could I have utmost confidence that if there's some clarity that needs to be done, that you will work with the opposition to make sure that happens.

Absolutely.

And I think you'll be amenable to whatever makes sense as long as we can get to the goal of what you're trying to do. And so I'm asking for an I vote. Is there a motion that would be good? Call to roll.

On AB 994 by Assemblymember Jackson. The motion is do passed to the Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee. [Roll Call]

You need one more vote and then your last one.

My last one is AB 742.

The puppy dog. Law enforcement police dog whenever you're ready.

Per the California Department of Justice, Mr. Chair, in 2021, nearly 12% of all use of force incidents that resulted in severe injury or death were caused by police canines. Nearly two thirds of all people seriously injured or killed by police canines in California were black or Latino, while 64% of those seriously injured or killed were unarmed.

Black Californians were more than twice as likely to fall victim to police canines as any other group and 2.6 times more likely than their white counterparts.

Latino Californians were more than twice as likely to fall victim to police canines as their white counterparts. The jaws of a police canine have enough force to break through sheet metal and often cause permanent nerve damage, and in some cases, permanent physical disfigurement to their victims. And in many cases, they have not yet been convicted of any crimes yet.

AB 742 will ensure that California will no longer condone the mauling of civilians by police canines, which is a gross misuse of force that would rarely be justified in any other context. We're not just talking about those who law enforcement are trying to apprehend.

They are also harming innocent people. Christine Naderer was bitten on the head by the Brentwood Canine police dog Marco, in her own home as she lay tucked inside a cramped crawl space in January 2019.

Adam Gabriel, a Marine Corps veteran, was bitten on the bicep by a police dog after Sonoma County sheriff's deputies wrongly detained him on suspicion of carjacking. Another man had taken the car, and the victim mistakenly identified Gabriel's car as the suspects.

Jesse Porter, an 89 year old man, was bitten on the left calf by a police dog in his own backyard, which led to his leg being amputated above the knee, and he died less than two months later in a rehabilitation center.

The police canine mistaken him for a suspect. Richard Earl May Jr. a 64 year old man, was bitten on the legs by a police dog named Riggs while trying to rescue a friend's cat at a construction site.

A civil jury in 2017 awarded him 1.1 million, ruling that San Mateo County sheriff's deputies used excessive force. Officer Matt Neff's police dog Bass mauled two 18 year old men during a search for armed robbery suspect in East Oakland, resulting in injuries requiring hospitalization and surgery.

Neither of the men were charged with a crime. I can keep going. Joel Alejo, a handyman, was attacked and repeatedly bitten by police dog Balco in his own backyard in June 2020.

He was not the kidnapping suspect that Palo Alto police were looking for. They were assisting mountain view officers in searching for him, and the City of Palo Alto paid 135,000 to settle the lawsuit filed by him.

It's important to respond to the narratives that opposition has floated around this bill, which is that a reduction in the use of police canines for arrest and apprehension will lead to an increase in deadly force use by law enforcement or pose an increased safety risk for officers.

To this, I will say that I care deeply for the safety of our fellow Californians who become sworn officers and protect our communities. However, the research on this issue is clear.

A study from 2022 from the Journal of Experimental Criminology found that the sudden suspension of police canine use for apprehension was not, and I repeat, was not associated with a statistical increase in officer or suspect injury or suspect's resistance during felony arrest.

It is also important to also note that there still may be other instances where some Amendments could be warranted. However, I have not received any substantive recommendations on Amendments.

Instead, I have received more ideological responses, which does not get to the problem I'm trying to solve.

How do we protect people from getting lifelong injuries and even death. To number one for those who were innocent in the first place, and even if they were found guilty, the penalty that the crime actually warranted does not equal to the life sentence of having a lifelong injury in the first place. There's clearly a problem.

The police departments who send this data to the Department of Justice, this is not my data. This is not a research study. This is the data that our own law enforcement agencies send to the Department of Justice themselves.

And so their own data says that there's a problem, and simply maintaining the status quo is just not acceptable. With that being said, joining me today in support is Sergeant Sean Allen with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department of Corrections and Adriana Wong with the ACLU, a co-sponsor for AB 742.

Good morning. Good morning. My name is Sean Allen, a sergeant with the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office/ Department of Corrections and former 2022 candidate for sheriff with nearly 34 years of combined service.

My experience with trained dogs includes owning, importing, handling and training extending back to the 1980s. Today, I will give you information based on my own experience, the 2021 California Department of Justice Use of Force report and the Marshall Project report.

On duty, I have seen the result of nearly 200 police canine bites. In some cases, bites resembling shark bites resulting in maiming, disfigurement, scarring, torn ligaments and fractures of mostly black and brown people. Dog training is based on drive, praise and reward.

Yet a police dog does not discern information at the same level that a human does once the dog has been sent out to apprehend a police canine does not know if a person is deaf, mute, blind, special needs, autistic, suffering from dementia, PTSD or in crisis related to mental health.

It doesn't know the difference between a child in many cases and an adult, an uninvolved resident, a suspect, and in some cases, even another police officer.

Some of these instances are supported by the data I recently spoke of. There have been instances where police canines have attacked other police officers, resulting with the officers shooting and killing the animal, clearly indicating the unpredictable behavior of a canine and the level of threat associated with a canine attack.

We need legislation to prevent innocent people and people presumed innocent from being bitten in their genitals, breast, head, neck and face due to the lack of regulated control of weaponized police canines. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, ma'am.

Good morning. Adrienna Wong with the ACLU California proud co-sponsor of AB 742. I'll be speaking about the public records and data that demonstrate the need for this legislation. State use of force data tells us that in just the last few years, police canines have injured hundreds of Californians so badly that they face death, protracted and obvious disfigurement or loss or impairment of a body member or organ.

And it tells us that people of color disproportionately suffer these injuries in the jaws of police dogs. Canines can kill people. The data tells us that in 2021, an unarmed man in Placer County died after a police dog lacerated his lower abdomen.

In Hayward, as Assemblymember Jackson mentioned, a police canine killed an 89 year old man in his own backyard. The city there said the canine just did what it was trained to do, which is what the City of Brentwood said when a canine there scalped an unarmed woman.

In the Oakland example that Assemblymember Jackson mentioned, the teenager that was mauled had his leg chewed to the bone. He was hospitalized for three weeks. He needed surgery and a skin graft. In Kern County, another woman was attacked while she was sleeping in her own home by a canine that was searching for a suspect.

The medical report said that her ear was questionably salvageable, and she might lose her hearing. The data tells us that most of the time people are injured this badly by canines, they are unarmed and a significant percentage of them are in mental health crisis. That tells us that police canines are not deescalating because these are exactly the situations that should be deescalated rather than being responded to with violence.

Data and public records, including body cam footage, show that police frequently use canines to attack people who are not fleeing or hidden but in plain sight, including people lying down, handcuffed or with their hands above their heads.

From public records, we know the claim that there is already accountability is false. Agencies fail to discipline officers who deploy dogs to attack unarmed people stopped for minor offenses. They deem the vast majority of dog bites within policy, even when dogs attack the wrong people entirely or the person bit was trying to surrender.

Public records, including body cam, also showed that dogs, extensively trained and regulated, refuse to recall or release their bite when commanded and will attack random bystanders or ordinary citizens asleep in their own homes or living their lives in their own neighborhoods. Restricting deployment of canines to when a crime is serious does nothing to prevent this.

Experts agree that there is no way to ensure dogs will behave as commanded, limit the force they apply to what is necessary and proportional, or even bite the right people because they are animals.

Finally, the data shows that using dogs to bite human beings is unnecessary. An academic study found that discontinuing a canine unit led to no increase in injury to officers or suspects or the amount of resistance during arrests.

And when we looked at the data for several California agencies, we found that decreases in canine deployment from year to year corresponded with decreases in shootings. Increases in canine deployment corresponded with increases in shootings. Agencies that use canines to injure people the most also have the highest numbers of shootings, while departments that do not have canine units at all have fewer or no recent shootings.

This confirms what we know, which is that officers have many tools for arresting people that do not involve deploying indiscriminate violence into a community or inflicting grievous lifelong injury. For all of these reasons, we respectfully ask for your aye vote.

Thank you. Any other witnesses in support?

Liz Beacon with ACLU California Action proud co sponsors, also for Smart Justice California.

Thank you.

Danica Rodarmel, on behalf of Initiate Justice and Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Leslie Caldwell Houston for the California Public Defenders Association in support.

Melissa Cosio with Californians for Safety and Justice in support.

John Vasquez on behalf of Communities United for Restorative Justice, in support.

Eric Harris, Disability Rights California, in support.

Nicholas Sackett, Social Compassion in Legislation and animal rights organization, in support.

Taneicia Herring from the California Hawaii NAACP in strong support.

Tom from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, strong support.

Melanie Kim, San Francisco Public Defender's office in support.

Jeronimo Aguilar from Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. All of Us or None, definitely in support. Thank you.

Annalisa Ruiz with Young Women's Freedom Center in support.

Aram James, retired public defender, also with the Coalition for Justice and Accountability, who strongly supports AB 742. Thank you.

Thank you, thank you. From witnesses in opposition.

King County Board of Supervisors and Shasta County Board of Supervisors in opposition.

You have five minutes, or whatever way you want to parse it out.

All right, sounds good. Thank you. Good morning, Chair, Members. My name is Alex Turcotte. I'm the chief.

Closer to the mic so we can all hear you.

Is that better? All right. Thank you. Chair and Members. my name is Alex Turcotte. I'm the Chief of Police with the Citrus Heights Police Department. I'm here today on behalf of the California Police Chiefs Association.

Thank you for giving me time to share our concerns regarding AB 742. First and foremost, I want to make it clear we agree that racially biased policing is unacceptable. As law enforcement management, police chiefs are responsible for training, education, and, when necessary, discipline relating to biased conduct. This is a responsibility we take incredibly serious, which is why we have partnered with the Legislature over the years to directly address biased conduct.

Thanks to our combined efforts, we now have mandatory background checks, robust training, public disclosure of complaints, and a decertification system that includes review of all biased conduct by Statewide Civilian Board. This is not to say our work here is done, but these are examples of direct efforts we have taken to address the issues underlying this Bill. Unfortunately, AB 742 is not a solution to biased policing. AB 742 strictly bans critical functions of our canine programs.

It's important to note our statistics show overwhelmingly that these programs reduce force, de-escalate situations, and protect lives. While we are still analyzing the data, an early review of statistics from several large agencies shows canine force is used in a fraction of 1% of all canine deployments. This means in over 99% of the tens of thousands of canine deployments per year. The intervention has led to apprehension or surrender without use of force.

Strict Department policies, training guidelines, statewide use of force laws, and a large body of case law work together to set the standards of use of canines. Notably, state law requires proportional force, de-escalation and crisis intervention reporting requirements, and more. As such, canines are used in response to violent activity, not low-level offenses. But in the rare situation the canine is deployed, they provide benefits that cannot be replaced.

Canines provide an early alert for officers to alert them to threats, allowing for more time and distance, both factors that are critical for de-escalation. A canine's sense of smell, hearing, and agility allow them to identify concealed threats that might not otherwise be found by officers. Canines can search areas that are difficult to access, such as large open spaces, attics, dark alleyways, crawl spaces, and other areas that provide a suspect a tactical advantage against an officer.

The bottom line, AB 742 removes canines from a role that protects officers and the public. As such, and on behalf of the 334 police chiefs in California, we respectfully must oppose AB 742 and ask for your No vote. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, chair and Members of the Committee. My name is Brad Meyer. I'm currently a captain with the Butte County Sheriff's Office and testifying on behalf of the California State Sheriff's Association in opposition of AB 742. I'm currently a handler.

I'm a former handler from two different California law enforcement agencies. I have been involved with the training, deployment, and supervision of police canines my entire career. I have been a canine handler for four different police canines and oversee the canine unit as a supervisor. Police canines enhance safety to the suspect by de-escalation. Suspects often see and hear a police canine and will give up prior to use of force by the law enforcement.

More often than not, the barking alone from a police canine will get the suspect to surrender peacefully without any use of force at all. As a canine handler, I have been involved with many different critical incidences throughout my career. Many times, suspects who are violent and dangerous felons have been found by my canine enhancing the safety of the officers, the suspect, and the community.

I was involved in an incident where a subject had an outstanding felony warrant for weapons and drug charges and a long history of violent crimes. He was a very dangerous offender. The subject had fled the scene into a large farming area and was hiding from officers. We conducted a long search of the area and my canine located the suspect in an area where we were not able to search by humans. The suspect was arrested with minor injuries.

In the area where the suspect was hiding, we located many different firearms. We were unable to see the suspect during the entire search and we would not have located him without my canine. I appreciate your time and thank you.

Thank you. Are there any other witnesses in opposition? Name and organization, please.

Sarah Aquino on behalf of the city of Folsom in strong opposition.

Good morning, Mr. Chair and Members. Shane Levine. On behalf of the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association, Association Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, California Fraternal Order of Police, Long Beach Police Officer Association, Sacramento Deputy Sheriff's Association, and also on behalf of Jennifer Fearing and California Fish and Game Warden Supervisors and Managers and the California Wildlife Officers Foundation. All in opposition. Thank you.

Thank you.

Chris Emery, lieutenant with the Folsom Police Department, opposed.

Thank you.

Chair and Members, Jonathan Feldman. This time on behalf of the city of Riverside who submitted a letter late but wanted to convey their concerns of the Bill. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, Mr. Chair and Members. Matthew Siverling, on behalf of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs and the California Peace Officers Association, both in opposition. Thank you.

Mr. Chair and Members Randy Perry with Aaron Read and Associates, on behalf of Porak and the California Association of Highway Patrol. In opposition.

Mr. Chair and Members. Ryan Sherman with the Riverside Sheriff Association, also with police officer associations of Claremont, Corona, Pomona, Palos Verdes, Newport Beach, Upland, Santa Ana, Burbank, Marietta, Arcadia, Riverside, Fullerton, Culver City, and the Deputy Sheriff's Association, Monterey County and Placer County, all in opposition. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning, Chair and Committee. Julio De Leon with the Riverside Sheriff's Office, on behalf of the Sheriff's Office and Sheriff Chad Bianco, we are in opposition. Thank you.

Thank you.

Gregory Tony, as a representative of the Western States Police Canine Association and a prior handler, 22 years of law enforcement and have personally had a dog potentially save my life and the life.

Thank you.

So opposed.

Thank you.

Robert Carlberg, on behalf of the Redondo Beach Police Officers Association, in opposition.

Thank you.

Mr. Chair and Members, Brandon Epp, on behalf of Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna, in opposition. Thank you.

Jim Stark, Witmer-Tyson Imports. We oppose.

Any other witnesses in opposition? We'll bring it back to Committee Members. Any comments or questions or? Mr. Lackey?

Yeah, thank you. Just as a reminder, I was here in 2019 when the Legislature passed a series of laws that directed law enforcement to utilize de-escalation techniques. It was clear the public wanted less lethal force. I feel like this particular Bill, AB 742, goes into a whole nother direction.

I'll never vote for a Bill that will restrict the ability of an officer to use less lethal force and that can de-escalate a life-threatening situation. Honest to complete statistics are very, very valuable, and here's one to think about. When canines are activated, the suspect surrenders prior to a bite over 90% of the time. That is a very powerful consideration that you are trying to strip from law enforcement. It's safer for an officer and safer for the suspect.

In spite of some of the stories that you have shared, I do believe, if anything, we should be using police dogs more. And that may sound contrary to, and it's not meant to be offensive. It's meant to be honest, because I believe that getting people to surrender and to stop the resistance is powerful because everybody wins, both the suspect and the officer, when you reduce resistance, and that is the role of canines. And so I will obviously not be supporting this Bill.

Thank you.

Thank you. I have a question for the in support with the. In your records, do you show how many people have actually gave up knowing there was a canine on scene?

No, that data is not available to us, nor is the comparator, I guess, of how many people will give up when there's no canine on scene. The closest thing we have is the one academic study that looked at a department that discontinued its canine unit. And there they showed that there was no change in the amount of resistance to officers during an arrest as a result of discontinuing the canine unit there.

Okay. And you also said that this academics who's taken this survey and given you these numbers also stated that there was a high number of suspects who were unarmed.

No, that is from the California State Use of Force data.

Okay. So with that data right there, with the unarmed, did you guys ever question or wonder why that was? Because there were so many unarmed suspects?

I think that's part of the impetus for this Bill.

Okay. For the opposition. Captain, as a handler, would you send your dog into an armed suspect to apprehend an armed suspect?

Depends on the situation, but most of the time, no.

Yeah. So in my experience, I've known handlers who take care of their canines like as if they were their partners, and they're not going to send them into a room when there's a known armed suspect in there. So it's probably why you're getting your unarmed data is so high.

So I've been receiving lots of phone calls about this Bill. The author obviously knows this. I've been getting text messages, emails, phone calls about this because this is really going to hit the law enforcement community. This is a tool in my eyes. And obviously, Mr. Lackey as well, that we're trying to take away from law enforcement. And this is a less lethal option. And I fear that law enforcement community is going to have to use a higher level of use of force by taking this away.

And I fear that the unintended consequences of this Bill, unfortunately, will lead to shootings that do not need to happen. I've seen it many times where the person who was getting apprehended did stop prior to the canine being deployed because they did see the canine and they didn't want to get bit.

I'd like to know maybe the stats on how many people have been bit twice or maybe three times, because usually after one time they've been bit, they kind of know what it feels like and they would give up. And then in custodial settings, I know that a lot of 4850 claims by the deputies have gone down when they've had canines in there, because usually the individuals who were not wanting to give up did give up once a canine was on scene.

So there are many uses to them, and there are many other factors that come into this as far as savings of money for employees, deputies, even the person that could be getting apprehended. And I see that also being a debt for the cities or the counties or even the state by not having those people available to those communities that they're sworn to keep safe. So I, unfortunately, will be a strong No on this.

Thank you. Any other? Mr. Zbur.

I just had some questions. Are the canine units considered peace officers? So we have in the Committee analysis a host of a description of existing law that requires that a peace officer has the ability to use certain levels of force based on totality of the circumstances of what they may believe may be threats to people.

For me, one of the things that is, I think, a difficult thing, especially given that this Bill is restricted to crowd control and apprehension, I think, isn't it, is how the Canine unit is making these very specific determinations about risk levels from the individual who's being apprehended or the crowd that's being controlled. Is the Canine unit, I've seen in some of the letters being referred to as peace officers, so are you expecting that the dog is making these determinations of who's a high risk?

It just sort of seems like this is a very crude way of making these kinds of determinations that I think are required under the law, where you have to make a determination at an early time. Then you set the canine out, and then there's no ability to really adjust the determination of the risk level. The canine is just sort of unleashed. And to me, that sort of feels really inhumane to individuals to treat any human being that way.

So I'm just wondering how you comply with the existing law related to use of force when you're using a canine.

Canines can't evaluate use of force. Only humans can. So that dog's not going to evaluate that use of force prior to going out there. That human is going to make that call and evaluate the totality of that circumstance prior to that deployment.

So do you consider a canine? I mean, it sounds like from the statistics, canines can inflict deadly force or pretty significant force. So how would you make a determination of that in the context of crowd control for example?

Just to speak to your first question, the canine, while we all love animals and there is some other protections for attacking a police dog, the canine itself is a tool. It's a less-than-lethal tool. The person held accountable to weighing the factors and deploying or launching the dog would be the handler.

The human police officer is in charge of that scene and would be held accountable for utilizing that force.

If I could just respond quickly to your question as well. I think it's a great question. The canine handler is absolutely making the decision to deploy the animal. However, at the moment of force, it's the canine that's making the decision. And as Sergeant Allen spoke to, the canine's ability to exercise judgment there is not the same as an officer's.

And that's why Professor Christy Lopez, who is a veteran Department of Justice attorney who looked at canine practices across the country, managed a number of consent decrees that address this issue, has concluded that the use of canines will result inherently in excessive use of force. Because a canine cannot know to modulate the force that it exerts in a moment to account for whether it's necessary, to account for whether it's proportionate in that moment, and in some instances, even if it's against the right person.

I just had one other question. Thank you. I really appreciate all of the responses. I think in your comments, you spent a lot of time focusing on some of the things that would be prevented by this Bill, which don't seem to me that the Bill prevents. The Bill looks to me like it's pretty focused on activities related to apprehension and arrest.

And so some of the things about losing the ability of canadine units to, for example, search for weapons or that kind of thing, I'm just wondering why it is that this Bill prevents those other things that you listed as being threatened by the Bill. Because it doesn't seem to me that the Bill does that.

Thank you for the question. I understand the logic there.

I would like to say that whenever police officers are in situations where the level of violence is significant, which would allow for the canine to be in that environment, the environment itself is inherently dangerous. So to prevent or to be absolutely sure that the canine would not bite in that kind of apprehension situation basically takes any type of defense away from the dog itself, too, and takes that.

The efficacy of that tool reduces it significantly, largely just not make sense, than to utilize the canine in that situation. I don't know if you want to add to that at all.

Yeah. The Bill is not going to limit the searching for weapons the canines are going to use to search for people that are armed or dangerous to the officer. That's kind of what we were talking about, I think.

Yeah, I guess, but in terms of the restricting, the Bill seems like it's focused on restricting use against humans to apprehend humans, to arrest humans. It doesn't seem like it would prevent the continuation of canine units to, for example, search luggage at the airport or do searches in a supermarket for weapons or bombs that might be there. It seems like those kinds of uses would continue, would be able to continue. Am I misunderstanding that or would.

That's correct.

Thank you very much.

Mr. Bryan.

No, I think my colleague from Santa Monica raised kind of an interesting point. Right? And you all mentioned this as well, that many times the presence of a canine leads a suspect to surrender, to give up. But if you've already sent it after me and I drop down, I'm still getting bit because the dog can't. Or your call-off has to be to a point that I think POST sets a really minimum level for its effectiveness. You can call the dog off within a foot from somebody.

You can call the dog off kind of immediately after letting off. How quickly can you adjust your commands to the dog given that you see somebody is known, and how often does that happen in practice?

So that happens all the time. That's one of those things that we constantly train on. It's the only tool in law enforcement that, once deployed, can be stopped prior to making contact with the suspect and called back to the handler. That control is what we hang our hats on.

We want that. So we're constantly working on that. So that line, and you talk about POST and POST, says that the dog has to be dedicated to the suspect, and then the call-off must be accomplished. But we continually train with those higher standards where we're trying to make that call-off. So it's right at the person, and the dog listens to the handler and comes back. It's the only tool, like I said earlier, the only tool that can be called back once deployed. We can't stop a bullet. You can't stop a baton strike.

I would love to see data collected on how often the call-back happens. Right. Because I think what the author is getting at is the legacy of this usage.

That reminds me of the DOJ Ferguson report, which I was interesting that it was in the analysis, because I remember being an undergrad in college, reading the fact that 90% of the dogs in Ferguson prior to the uprising were unleashed on Black people and that every bite was a Black person. I'm thinking about the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department and the historical reference to Black and brown people as dog biscuits. Right.

And so I think that is the harmful legacy that the author is trying to get at. I think the crowd control situation is something that while our sheriff in L.A. County had a broader opposition, the Bill has no opposition to that, nor do, I think should anybody, knowing the legacy of law enforcement dogs and the civil rights movement. I think the author has raised a willingness to collaborate and work, because right now it's kind of a blanket, no apprehension.

It makes me wonder, when is the canine unit deployed? Is it that this is a burglary? We feel like it's the canine unit. Who's making that determination? And is there a strict criteria for when the canine unit is deployed, or is it just there available in a you want to go, especially when you use such a blanket thing like a violent scenario? When is the canine unit deployed?

I know somebody makes that determination, but is there a statewide standard for when you can and cannot deploy the canine unit, or is that at the discretion of whoever is leading the canine unit at the time and the availability of it?

That's going to be the discretion. Use of Force Policy is going to dictate that, and the officer is going to make that determination on what crime that has been committed, how severe that crime is.

Does that person pose a danger to the public or the officers? Is he actively resisting? He's going to evaluate each and every call differently, and that's how that determination is going to be came to.

And I think it's some of that variation that I think the author and I don't want to speak for the author, but this Bill appears to be attempting to address as well. Right?

Especially when we have the characterization of the canine unit as a less lethal versus could do permanent harm is inherently excessive force. Right? We've got these two dichotomies here, but as a less lethal that can be deployed for anything. Right?

In fact, we prefer to deploy less lethal, not in all instances, but relative to a situation where you would have lethal force if you're not viewing the canine as lethal force, whereas if it did fall under lethal force or excessive force guidelines, it might fall under a different deployment schedule. But it seems like there's just wide variation right now. So I think there's a lot of work to do here. I think some folks need to sit down and talk and think about it.

And I know the Vice Chair has a deep history in this as well, but I know the author's intentions are noble and I know there's a giant gap here. And through that gap, many people are suffering life-altering damage at the hands of what we're calling a less lethal. And so I'd like to see this move forward in the work to continue, and I want to thank the author for bringing it today.

Ms. Bonta is next. Ms. Ortega. I'm sorry. Ms. Ortega is next.

I just had a quick question. You mentioned Hayward a couple of times. That's the city that I represent and was reading the article that talked about the incident there. And in that incident, the dog that caused the death of the 89-year-old who was innocent, that dog had bitten 29 other people, and three of them were innocent.

So I guess the question is what happens in these situations where you clearly have a canine who has a history of or, I don't know what happens in the situation where it's clearly that this canine has bitten three other innocent people and then led to the murder of another. And so I'm wondering what's happening in between that time and what you're doing to prevent that from happening.

So I'm not familiar exactly with the Hayward scenario, but I can talk to general practice. So there's generally a use of force review that happens over any significant use of force, and canines definitely would be there. The reasons surrounding the deployment, including what the want was thought to be when they got there, other factors, and tools that were available to the handler at the time. All those things are taken into consideration. I'm not sure with the statistic of the innocent person.

I don't know if that is ultimately found innocent of a crime or the wrong person in general. But as long as the handler and the canine have been properly trained, they're following training procedures. They reasonably did what appeared necessary in the eyes of statute, policy, and another canine handler, then that would be deemed proper use of force.

If that was deemed improper because there was lack of training, lack of following through policy, the handler let the canine go when they shouldn't have, then that would trigger accountability measures such as either suspending the dog, retraining the handlers, or discipline, depending on the severity of the issue and the severity of the violation.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So I just want to help for all those out there as well.

I know a lot of questions from one of my colleagues was about using options for weapons, bombs, those kind of detections. Are your canines cross-trained to do that for the most part? I know most are, for the most part are protection dogs. How many of them would you say if this Bill was passed, would be able to be able to do the bomb detection, the weapon detection? Because in my neck of the woods, not all of them are cross-trained and able to do that.

It depends on the agency. Majority of dogs probably are cross-trained. They have patrol apprehension functions, and then another detection portion on top of that, either firearms, explosives, or narcotics, something like that. And then there's agencies that don't do that at all. So it's kind of across the board. Some just have apprehension dogs and some just have detection dogs. So it's kind of across.

Okay. So I just wanted to clarify that right there. And as far as my other colleagues with the call-offs, I've actually been an agitator with the sleeve and actually had the dog stop in front of me when called off. And that also will come back to a lot of training. And you can obviously tell which ones train with their dogs more often than those that don't. And I think that's something that will also be addressed later. And Chief, you alluded to the canine. As far as my colleague giving the example of the canine.

How would that process go? I know you talked about policy, but would you guys immediately pull that canine off the street, or would you guys let it continue its shift if you guys found immediately that there was another bite that wasn't warranted?

If there's a canine bite that on its face appears to be outside of policy or egregious enough or significant enough to have caused severe injury, we would pull that canine, in our department, we would pull that canine off the street, until which time we could conduct a full investigation.

Thank you.

Ms. Bonta, could you go ahead? You want to answer a question or do it in your close?

Well, one of my witness wanted to respond to the question as well.

Go ahead. She wants to hear.

In terms of the call-off.

So it's all over social media and other places. You see many instances where the dogs are sent out to apprehend and they're either already biting or they're not biting and they're called off and they do not respond as they're supposed to.

There's a case in Kern, County, I think it's all over the media, where a deputy accidentally opened the door of a canine officer and the canine went and bit a person who was already arrested in handcuffs, face down on the cement.

Throughout dog training, when you're training dogs, one of the biggest things, even the dog sports that are associated to police dog certifications such as KNPV and Schutzen and IPO and all these other disciplines, one of the biggest things you see, even with high-level training dogs, high-level trained dogs, is they negate to call-off when they're told to, or when they turn the corner and they face an agitator or a suspect, they bite anyway. So dogs aren't coming. They're pretty unpredictable.

I mean, again, talking about the instances where there was a little boy bitten at a community service event, the dog just took off and bit the little boy in the face. It's all over social media. There is a guy walking down the street and an officer opens the door of his patrol car just to let the dog out, and the dog ran across the street and bit him. So in these instances, the dogs are being called off, but they're still biting.

In the case in San Jose, which is a big issue, they send the dog out to find the person who's in a trash can and knock the trash can over, and the dog bites and locks onto the person's throat. And for over a minute, for over a minute, the dog refuses to let off. You can hear the officers, some of the officers saying, oh my God. And once the dog just refuses to come off and continues a bite, then they resort back to saying, stop resisting.

How do you resist with a dog locked onto your neck? So the dog's out of control. You can't control the dog in many situations. And that's why we're seeing instances where police officers, when they're attacked by the same dogs we're talking about, they resort to using deadly force. We only resort to using deadly force as we're trained to prevent great bodily injury or death.

Ms. Bonta.

I think my challenge is that while POST has minimum training and performance standards for police canines, it's very clear that there is a huge variance in terms of the deployment practices and procedures for use of canines. And that is of concern to me. We want to essentially have the same kind of policy applicable so that if I'm in Oakland versus Hayward versus Fresno, as a citizen, I can understand how and when canine might be deployed.

And then I just wanted to comment on the opposition's initial comments around bias and the use of bias, or the sense that bias has or has not been fully addressed here. Very clearly, from the data that we have here, there's a disproportionate use of an experience of people of color being the victim of the use of canines, and that's irrefutable and something that should be significantly recognized. So I'm a little suspicious of the comment that you made related to that.

I will be voting for this Bill.

Thank you. Any other comments?

So I just want to thank you for being here and I want to thank the author for bringing the Bill. I think it's a righteous Bill and it's important, but I am hoping that the author will work with the opposition to maybe focus on tightening it up a bit. I'm nervous about, and I know this isn't the author's intent at all. I'm nervous about the continuation of use of canine units for searching for bombs and weapons and those kinds of things.

And so if there could be some kind of focus on leashed versus unleashed uses of the canines, I would appreciate that. But I will be supporting the Bill today.

Thank you. You may close.

Thank you, Members. Very robust conversation. And this is what this Bill is intended to do. Whenever we see data that is disproportionate in use, whenever you see stories of innocent people being injured with lifelong injuries, whenever you see that, obviously there is not a statewide standard in terms of how we use canines.

That means there's a problem that needs to be solved. And from out throughout this time, I've gotten more death threats, I've gotten more threats of violence based upon law enforcement POST about this Bill than I have received any legitimate substantive options for amendments. So the idea is that, and those who know me know that I'm trying to make sure that we have a balanced approach, but just trying to kill this Bill is not going to happen. But if we have some things that will make sure.

I've heard stories of a canine that actually saved a law enforcement officer because that they were being attacked by someone, but they were able to call on the dog to save them. Legitimate. Let's figure out how to fix that to make sure those things can happen. 90% of people who see the dog, I would be one of them, on the scene, they give up because they don't want to deal with the dog. Let's find how to fix that so they can be on the scene.

But we need to protect people from being bitten in these ways. So if we want to get to the crux of making sure that we have both safety and justice, I am all for that. And I will have as many substantive meetings as possible to make sure that we get this right. Right? But we're going to leave ideology off the table because we're not going to get anywhere with that.

Let's get to making sure that both people and law enforcement, innocent and guilty, are both treated with dignity, humanity, respect, and that we can both have safety and justice at the same time. I respectfully ask for an Aye vote.

Thank you. And you and I have had several conversations about this and I've also had several conversations with Chief Luna on this and their practices.

I know you are open to some kind of statewide, I mean, there's an opportunity, as Ms. Bonta said, for maybe a statewide policy on the use of canines in law enforcement. And I think you're open to that because at the end of the day, as was said earlier, what happens in Hayward may be different than what happened in L.A. City, what happened in Tulare County. And there doesn't seem to be a statewide practice, policy, procedure for how to deal with that.

And so obviously I'll be voting yes to that. But I just also want to leave with the opposition that if you're listening, the author is willing to work through this, leaving you with the use of this tool that probably 90%, probably 99% of what you want to use this tool, you can do it. And there's search and rescue where there's no problem with that. It's what happens when you let this tool loose. It's just like having a gun.

A gun by itself, sitting on the table doesn't do anything. It's the people that takes the gun and then something may happen that could lead to tragic events, tragic events that happen in other places. So we really need to address that to make sure that no tragedies happen because of the use of canines.

And the last thing I would just tell individuals when it comes to canines and minorities and people of color, my uncle, my grandfather in Little Rock, Arkansas, to this day have problems with police dogs because what happened to them in 1957, 58,59, 60 with police and dogs. Some of us learned what was going on. And so as you look at this esteemed body, majority of us are people of color and may not have had a good relationship with canines and law enforcement.

And so that's what you're hearing. And so please take that into consideration and read your audience, especially when you come and bring people up to speak on this. Because as I was watching, I didn't see a whole lot of people of color opposing us from law enforcement side. I saw a lot of diverse people from all over California that supported the Bill. And that should tell you where the people of California, when they look at this, what they want to do.

But ultimately, you have an author there that's willing to come up with a statewide policy that you can live with and that we can live with. And I would encourage you, if it gets out of this Committee, to take full advantage of that and to figure out how we can make this happen, because we do need a statewide policy, in my opinion. And that's the beauty of this Committee, where we talk things out and hopefully, we come up with something that works for everybody.

So hopefully we can get to that. With that, do we have a motion? Is there a second? Call the roll.

On AB 742 by Assembly Member Jackson. The motion is do pass to the Appropriations Committee. [Roll call].

That measure passes. Next I have Philip Ting, but he's not here. I have Diane Dixon. I don't see her if she's here. I have Villapudua. Not here. So Lowenthal is here. You made it. No, I had to go through the list so they know I at least called all the names before we got to you.

As you should, Mr. Chair.

AB 725, item number nine.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I understand you received my brother here in Committee last week. My older brother.

The judge.

The judge, yes, the honorable judge Lowenthal. I appreciate the care you gave him. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And Members, I am very pleased to present AB 725. This is a common sense bill. It is closing a loophole in our existing laws. It's supporting responsible gun owners in our state. It's also supporting law enforcement.

It requires the owner of a firearm, frame or receiver to report the loss or theft of those components to a law enforcement agency so that they can be entered into the Department of Justice Automated Firearms System. While frames or receivers are considered firearms for the purpose of registration under licensing, under current law, they are not treated as such when it comes to requirements for reporting lost or stolen firearms.

AB 725 closes this loophole by making failure to report a lost or stolen frame or receiver the same infraction as failure to report a firearm. The frame or receiver serves as the base platform for most firearms and typically houses the trigger, hammer, bolt firing pin, with some variants depending on the type of firearm that allow them to operate once assembled. So while these parts may seem innocuous on their own, they represent one of the critical components of any operational firearm.

I should also point out that there is clear regulatory definition of frames and receivers by the ATF. Requiring anyone who owns a frame or receiver to report them to law enforcement agencies if they are lost or stolen is a common sense approach to ensuring that we are appropriately tracking these components that can be used to assemble a fully operational firearm. Finally, AB 725 is in keeping with existing gun laws.

Under current law, lost or stolen firearms must be reported to law enforcement agencies, and so long as they are reported, the owner is not in violation of the law. AB 725 simply represents an additional component of responsible gun ownership. I'm pleased to be joined by Ben Rudin on behalf of the Conference of California Bar Associations, who is here to testify in support of this bill.

Thank you. You have five minutes.

Thank you, Members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify. As you said, I'm Ben Rudin on behalf of the Conference of California Bar Associations in support of AB 725. This bill would require gun owners to report not only a lost or stolen firearm, but a lost or stolen frame, receiver, or precursor part. The frame or receiver is the part of the gun that has the firing mechanism and is considered a firearm under federal law and most of our state laws.

Reporting a lost or stolen frame or receiver or precursor part can help prevent gun trafficking. Some black market guns are built with a stolen frame, receiver or precursor part and then sold in the black market. By reporting a lost or stolen frame or receiver, gun owners can help law enforcement track them down sooner. Furthermore, it can help prevent accidental shootings.

If someone else finds a lost frame, receiver or precursor part and uses it to build a gun, the gun can lack valuable safety features and result in an accidental shooting. Finally, with rights come responsibilities. Reporting a lost or stolen frame, receiver, or precursor part should be a responsibility of gun ownership, as it's within the responsibility of ensuring firearms are always secure and accounted for. Now, while I still have time, I'm going to address an argument by the opposition.

In its letter, it said the term precursor part is so vague that it could require people to report as lost or stolen something as benign as a pin or a spring. Luckily, that interpretation doesn't fit within the statutory scheme. The definition that we use in this bill is the same definition used in many of our firearm statutes already. Examples include requiring background checks, firearm safety certificate, and waiting 10 days.

So unless the opposition is going to argue that those people might be breaking the law every time they buy a pin or a spring without a background check, a firearm safety certificate and wait 10 days, or they don't wait 10 days, that interpretation falls flat. Finally, this bill simply means that if you have to do a background check, get a firearm safety certificate and wait 10 days to buy it, then you have to report it lost or stolen, if that happens. It doesn't expand-

It doesn't expand what's considered a firearm compared to with many of our other statutes. Thank you again. And I urge an aye vote.

Thank you. We'll hear from other witnesses in support.

Lizzie Buchen, Prosecutors Alliance of California, in support.

We'll move to witnesses in opposition. Seeing no witnesses in opposition, we'll bring it back to the Committee. I'll second. Any other comments? Mr. Lowenthal, you may close.

I respectfully request your aye vote. Thank you.

Thank you.

On AB 725 by Assembly Member Lowenthal, the motion is 'do pass to the Appropriations Committee.' [Roll Call].

Thank you. That measure is on call. It needs two votes.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

We will move now to--Item Number 19: AB 862: Rebecca Bauer-Kahan.

Thank you, Madam Chair and Members. I'm here to present AB 862. Mr. Lackey has seen this bill many times. It is a simple bill that would require the County Sheriff's Office to submit a report to the Legislature that focuses on the Board of State and Community Correction success rates in reducing recidivism.

A 2021 state audit report found that counties are lacking in their oversight for realignment spending and are withholding surplus funds that could be used to improve public safety. The Legislature should focus on bringing full transparency to the rehabilitative, exercise, and educational programs offered in our county jails.

AB 862 will require a standardized look at the valuable information provided by the sheriffs about the success rate within the county jail's rehabilitative services. Through the use of recidivism reports, state legislators will be able to make legislative decisions that will help us ensure that those programs that work will happen more often and those that don't work we maybe won't fund. The bill will help maintain public safety, reduce the overall size of incarcerated populations, and reduce local corrections costs.

With me today in support of AB 862 is Lesli Caldwell-Houston with the California Public Defenders Association, and Thanh Tran with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

Thank you. You'll have five minutes between you.

Thank you. Thank you. My name is Thanh Tran with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, pronouns: he/him, Policy Associate, and AB 862 is about collecting data so we can best serve our communities by making sure that we are spending money on resources that actually work, right? So resources that are actually stopping this cycle of humans coming in and out of our county jails and then either dying or graduating to prison. So this is a very common sense bill.

If you pay an electrician to fix your lights, you want to know if your lights got fixed. And it's the same concept here. We invested millions of dollars into rehabilitation in county jails, and we just want to know if folks are getting rehabilitated. That's simply what this data bill is trying to do.

So I spent two and a half years incarcerated in Santa Clara County Jail, and 80 percent of that two and a half years incarcerated in Santa Clara County Jail, I spent locked down inside of a cell. Programming was not incentivized or was it a priority. We got, on average, about one to two hours a day outside of our cells.

I learned also in county that the majority of people who were incarcerated with me in that county jail were going through either a mental health crisis or substance abuse crisis. And these were the people who tended to cycle in and out of the jail regularly. So I understand that offering services in jails is extremely difficult. I understand that jails are not centers for healing or support.

However, it is vitally important that if a person gets to a point where they are committing a crime and getting incarcerated, if they get to that point where they are in the state's care, we have to ask ourselves why. We have to ask ourselves what happened to this person and not simply what's wrong with this person because every person who does not come back to county jail is a person who is not committing crimes, and that is public safety.

So lastly, I want to say, no program, no county, no country can be successful without data. If we do not know what is working or not working, we cannot fill the gaps to see what will ultimately stop people from committing crimes and crowding our jails and prisons. So as conscientious problem-solvers that we are, as responsible stewards of California's tax dollars, I implore you, please pass this bill.

Thank you. Next witness.

Good morning, Committee Members. My name is Lesli Caldwell-Houston. I have nearly 40 years of work within Indigent Defense, and I'm very pleased to be here to testify in support of AB 862 offered by Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan. We as a society are always calling for data, as it's how we know what works and what does not.

Requiring sheriffs to report the nature of their anti-recidivism programs and the program's success rate in reducing recidivism can tell us what is working and what needs to be changed or reworked. We know that recidivism can be reduced by addressing the criminogenic needs of the individuals in the criminal justice system. As public defenders, we always encouraged our clients to participate and complete, be successful in any programs that were available to them. Without data, we don't know definitively what is truly successful in the endeavors to reduce recidivism.

Local sheriffs are responsible for providing these important services. Looking at success rates will assist local authorities in determining how to best distribute our resources. Because it's the sheriffs that provide the services, we need their data. Thus, this bill's requirements are critical to the overall success in reducing our recidivism rates. Therefore, we urge your yes vote. Thank you.

Any other witnesses in support? Name and organization.

Danica Rodarmel, on behalf of Initiate Justice.

Thank you. Any other witnesses in support?

Melanie Kim, State Policy Director for the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, in support.

Thank you.

Jeronimo Aguilar, Policy Analyst with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, in strong support.

Thank you.

Alissa Moore, Elder Freeman Policy Fellow, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, in support.

Thank you.

Tatiana Lewis, with All of Us or None, in strong support.

Thank you.

Joanne Scheer with Felony Murder Elimination Project, in strong support.

All right, thank you. Any witnesses in opposition? Mr. Salzillo. Hello. Good morning. Good to see you again.

Good morning. Mr. Chairman and Members, Cory Salzillo, on behalf of the California State Sheriffs' Association, in opposition to the bill. This is the third version of this bill, I think, and several others have preceded it. Sheriffs across the state provide meaningful rehabilitative program to jail inmates with the desire to enhance reentry into society. The offenders that come into our jail, we don't want them to come back.

That's just the bottom line. Unfortunately, the bill is ambiguous. It's not that we're opposed to knowing outcomes about the programs that we offer. The bill just says recidivism rates, and it defines what recidivism is. We have no way of knowing when somebody recidivates, particularly outside of a particular county.

So if I work at Los Angeles County Jail and I know that John Smith is in my custody and he gets a program and he recidivates and he comes back to the LA County Jail, I can measure that. I know that. But if John Smith is in my jail and goes through a program and gets out and then moves to Fresno County and recidivates and ends up in the Fresno County Jail or in state prison, I don't know that. Don't have a way of knowing that short of calling the Fresno County Sheriff and getting lucky and saying, 'hey, by any chance, has John Smith been in your jail?'

There's no acknowledgement of--there's a lack of available ways of tracking this information, right, wrong or indifferent. That's just the reality of it. This bill has been vetoed. Governor said last year, this is overly broad, creates a large mandate, potentially costing the state millions of dollars.

We're not in any better fiscal position this year than we were last year. On the notion of realignment and the rehabilitative programs that sheriffs are providing, we see the value in providing those programs. We know we need to do that. But we did not ask for the obligation to supervise the population that we're talking about here, the realigned population. So it's not like the state is making an investment by giving the county's money for realignment. That was part of the deal, right?

The deal was you take all of these people and put them in your jails and you supervise them on probation. And in connection with that, we will provide you the funding because we think you can do it cheaper and better than the state. We were around for that, right? So that was the deal. So it's not like the state is saying, 'hey, here's a bunch of money, go do good stuff with it.'

And we're saying, 'okay, we're going to spend your money, but we're not going to tell you what we do with it or how good of a job we do with it.' That's not the case. So you just need to be clear about what we're talking about, the tens of thousands of offenders who we now supervise prior or subsequent to realignment that we didn't have before. This bill, the predecessors, none of them have money attached to it.

I know you sit on the Subcommittee that is appropriate to this, as do others, and I know that we've had that conversation before, but none of those bills have had money. This bill doesn't have money. So if it's important that we do that, I think we ought to have that discussion. But anyway, for those reasons, we'd ask for your no vote. Thank you.

Thank you. Any others in opposition? Seeing none, we'll bring it back to Committee Members. Any questions? Comments? Mr. Lackey.

Yeah. This is an interesting discussion and one that I've believed in for a long time that deserves recognition, and we deserve a better metric. We deserve to know what level of success because I will tell you something from a personal side. I was very, very discouraged in believing in rehabilitation. Being a law enforcement official, all you see is failure after failure after failure after failure. So I had the unique opportunity to go to the prison as elected official, and I made an arrangement to meet with LWOPs.

That's life without the possibility of parole. And the reason for meeting with them, these were people who had indicated that they wanted to change, and within the institution, the best thing they could hope for was an honor camp. And so I was meeting with these individuals, as a White, Republican law enforcement person. So there was no holds barred. They had nothing to gain by giving me misinformation. And I met with--it was about a dozen of them.

And in my discussion with them, I told them the reason why I was there is I wanted to believe in change of heart because it seems like the more hardened criminals rarely, if ever, really rehabilitate. And I will tell you that I was convinced that every one of those individuals that I spoke to had a change of heart, and they wept. And these were people who identified themselves as monsters and said that they deserve to be in custody.

And why our institution doesn't use people like that to help, I don't know. I'm trying to make that actually happen because they are the best trusted advocates that our society could ever hope for. But I do believe in change, and I do believe that we need to be better at trying to encourage positive outcomes. I do believe that there are some that will not change, that have no desire to ever change, but that should not stop our effort.

That should not keep us from trying to be compelling and to try to track, and we need a metric to know success, because all we seem to hear about are failures, and failures are something to pay attention to as well. I'm not saying that they are not. But let's also track success, right? And so we can know where we are failing in this system because I believe that there's a lot more failure than there is success.

But that does not--I mean, I'm a super minority member. If I measured my value on success, I'm telling you, I don't know why I would be sitting here. So I'm just trying to be honest with everybody. This is a good measure. This is something, and I know there are financial challenges. When aren't there, right? To kill something because money is scarce, sometimes maybe that'll be the path.

But I would tell you in 2018, I had a similar bill, and it went the direction that I hope this does not go. We need this kind of thing, and thank you for bringing it forward, and you clearly have my support.

Thank you, Mr. Lackey.

Yes. Mr. Bryan.

I fully agree with Mr. Lackey.

Whoa.

I agree with Mr. Lackey.

I'm glad I could bring you together.

Ms. Bonta.

Well, speaking as the others referenced, as the Chair of Public Safety Subcommittee, I certainly agree with Mr. Lackey as well. We actually have found a lot of common ground in our Subcommittee, Budget Subcommittee related to this very same thing, making sure that we have additional transparency and information and data to be able to inform the decisions that we need to be able to make.

And that, quite frankly, is investment in an opportunity to be able to know whether or not the rehabilitation programs and programs that we are focused on to reduce recidivism are effective and to what extent they are actually being utilized. There's no better use of our funds than to ensure that we actually have the ability to measure our progress and success with legislation as this does that allows us to be able to understand in totality, in the aggregate, what we are looking at.

I see Assembly Member Dixon right over your shoulder there, who had legislation that would have done the same but was much more specific to the individual, which I found some privacy issues with. This bill does not propose to do that. It really is trying to understand what is happening at each facility. And I appreciate that and the authors move to that. And if you are seeking coauthors, I would love to coauthor this bill.

Love that. Thank you.

Any others? With that, you may close.

I am just going to let Mr. Bryan and Mr. Lackey's words be my close. Thank you. I respectfully ask for your aye vote.

And I want to thank you for bringing this. As the opposition pointed out--I'll call him Cory because we've been together for so long--when we foisted everybody down to the local level, the numbers was like 160,000 that were incarcerated. It's now in the 90s. We need to know for better or worse, if we're going to be honest with one another, we're going to be honest about Prop 47, 57, rehabilitation, we need to know what happened to those individuals. Did they get into rehabilitation programs?

The reason why that number is not jumping up is because they're doing well. If they're not doing well, we need to find out why so we can make corrections to that. And so I do believe we need to fund it because I don't believe an unfunded mandate coming from local government. But most important, if we find programs that are very successful, we need to continue to fund those because there's an ROI, return on investment. We're looking at about 230,000,000 if we close ten prisons right now.

Think about if we could close more--ensuring that the public is safe and that people don't recidivate and do more damage--how much more money we can save taxpayers. And I think we're on the same page with the opposition that we just need to make sure they have the resources to do it.

And what bothers me, and I've said this a million times, that we can find out that information if we cut across, and maybe this is where we can help lines to give law enforcement the tools to be able to give us that information or having another group do it. Because as far as I'm concerned, if you just check people's State Franchise Tax records, if they're working every day, hopefully they're too tired to go out and create mayhem and problems.

If they're working every Monday through Friday, hopefully they're good citizens. And I would think the majority of them, if they have a steady job which cures poverty and other problems, that they won't have time to do that. And that's an easy--think about it--that's an easy fix. But as the opposition said, they may not have access to that or we may have some constitutional barriers to be able to provide that.

Maybe we need to also help with your bill to eliminate some of those constitutional barriers so that we can get that information readily and easily. I mean, we have the technology, we can instantaneously get that information so that there's not a whole lot of staff hours at the local level.

And so I'm putting that out there as a possible solution as hopefully this moves forward, so that we're working together to get this done and listen to what the local entities need to be able to be successful. Yes. This is a Policy Committee. The money part will--I have to deal with later when we come over there--but we'll deal with it when it gets there, if it gets out of here. There a motion? Is there a motion? Is there a second? Mr. Bryan seconded. Okay. We have a bipartisan motion and second. Call the roll.

On AB 862 by Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan, the motion is 'do pass to the Appropriations Committee.' [Roll Call].

That measure passes.

Thank you.

So we have a half hour before--is Mr. Ting here? No. Ooo. Your timing is impeccable.

My ears were burning.

So we're going to recess really close to noon and then come back again. So those of you who are waiting, we may not get to you until after 1:30 and across the way in Room 127. So depending on how long Mr. Ting is, this may be the last one. Okay. If it's short, then Mr. Patterson is after that.

Mr. Chair, AB 881 is my Be the Jury bill. It builds on a pilot that I did for San Francisco to allow San Francisco the ability to privately raise funds to pay jurors to pay low income jurors or working family jurors more money, from $15 to $100. The pilot's been so successful, we'd like to expand that throughout the state. Too often our juries do not reflect the people who are in the system.

We always say you are allowed to have a jury of your peers. Most often you have people who are facing criminal trial and you have a jury that doesn't really look like them or represent them. Too often we have working people who take financial hardship and because of the fact that we're only paying them $15 a day, we excuse them. But what happens is jurors are not diverse and they don't really represent the people who are facing potential court cases.

So just for example, after we did the pilot and the numbers are still coming in because it's a real time pilot in San Francisco, we found that the jury pool became much more diverse. 68% of the people identified as people of color, 81% of the people said they wouldn't have been able to participate without financial assistance from the pilot. And so we were very pleased with the results and we're still getting more data.

But it's clear that this is absolutely critical to make sure that we actually do fulfill our promise to allow people, a jury of their peers. With that, I have one witness.

Good morning. My name is Michelle Lau and I'm the senior manager of the San Francisco Financial Justice Project in the treasurer's office. I'm here today to speak in support of AB 881 Be the Jury California, and to share our experience implementing the San Francisco Be the Jury pilot program by increasing jury pay for criminal cases to $100 per day of jury service for low to moderate income Californians.

AB 881 would ensure that all Californians have access to a jury of their peers, which is required by our constitution and is the bedrock of our justice system. Raising jury pay has been identified as a solution to improve our justice system for many years. In a report by the Judicial Council, they found that financial circumstances were the top reason people were granted hardship excuses.

This bill builds on a successful pilot program that we implemented in San Francisco along with all of our justice partners at San Francisco District Attorney's office, the public defender's office, the Bar Association, and the Superior Court. In San Francisco it's unusual to have the DA and public defender on the same side of an issue, but this bill is one of those rare cases where everyone agrees that fairness and equity are critical to having a strong justice system and jury diversity is core to that.

Our DA and public defender both sent representatives here today because this is such an important bill for our justice system. We've also heard from DA's and public defenders across the state that this is sorely needed. In the San Francisco pilot program, we wanted to test if raising jury pay from $15 per day to $100 per day for low to moderate income jurors would make a difference in the economic and racial diversity of juries.

We have now had the program up and running for a year and the results have been very promising. As the Members cited the vast majority of participants, 81% of people said they could not have served without the $100 per day stipend. Participants reflect the racial demographics of our at large San Francisco population, and feedback from people has been overwhelmingly positive. People report having learned more about the importance of jury service and encourage the continuation of the program for other jurors.

Participants also have a household income of just under $40,000 on average, which means the program is indeed serving people who need the stipend the most. In terms of administration, it's been a smooth process. We worked closely with our court to build information about Be the Jury into their processes, ensured that we got the word out about the program and streamlined the application process so that's not burdensome for people applying or for the courts to review.

We'd be happy to share all of our materials with other county courts so that everyone in California has access to a jury of their peers. Lastly, I wanted to share a direct quote from a juror who participated in Be the Jury. Keith Wincitis said, Be the Jury made it possible for me to serve as a juror without worrying about whether I could afford meals or meet my basic needs.

He also explained how this program has demonstrated our commitment to building a more inclusive and just legal system. We're very excited about the possibility of expanding this impactful program statewide. Thank you to Assemblymember Ting for introducing this important legislation, and I respectfully ask for your aye vote. Thank you.

Moving Bill.

Second. Are there any other witnesses in support? Name and organization.

Liz Beam Prosecutors Alliance of California in support.

Danica Rodarmel, on behalf of initiate justice and Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Melissa Cosio with Californians for Safety & Justice in support.

John Vasquez, on behalf of Communities United for Restorative Justice in support.

Ivana Gonzales with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, the Coalition for Family Unity in full support.

Melanie Kim, San Francisco Public Defender's Office co sponsor in support and on behalf of the following organizations ACLU California Action, Fair Chance Project, Safe Return Project, GLIDE, Coalition of Homelessness, HomeRise, San Francisco Financial Justice Project a co sponsor, Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos, Young Women's Freedom Center, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, California Public Defenders Association, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, Conference of California Bar Associations, Drug Policy Alliance, HomeRise, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, Prosecutors Alliance, University of San Francisco School of Law, Racial Justice Clinic, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning. Carmen-Nicole Cox on behalf of ACLU California Action in strong support.

Thank you.

Jeronimo Aguilar, here on behalf of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children. Thank you.

Kim Stone, Stone Advocacy on behalf of the California District Attorneys Association, in support.

Alice Michel on behalf of the California Public Defenders Association, in support.

Analisa Ruiz on behalf of Young Women's Freedom Center and Sister Warriors, San Jose chapter in support.

Tatiana Lewis on behalf of All Of Us Or None in strong support.

Alissa Moore Legal Services for Prisoners with Children in full support.

Lawrence Cox All of Us or None, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children in support.

Dr. Raynon Ross on behalf of San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, in very strong support.

Thank you. Are there any witnesses in opposition? Any witnesses in opposition? Seeing none, bring it back to Committee Members. Any questions, comments? Seeing none, you may close.

Very much appreciate the help with the Committee. Appreciate all the sponsors. Just respectfully ask for an aye vote.

Thank you. Chairs recommending an aye vote. I think we have a motion and second. Call the roll.

On AB 881 by Assemblymember Ting. The motion is due passed to the Appropriations Committee. [Roll Call]

The Members on call we need. One more member. Ms. Dixon.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you. Are we ready?

It looks like a bunch of people are coming up.

All right.

I feel like you have friends.

Come on up. Thank you. All right, I think we're all here.

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Mr. Chair and Members of the Committee. I'm here today to present Assembly Bill 758, a form of gun control. AB 758 creates an enhancement for the possession or use of an unserialized gun, also known as a ghost gun, at the time a felony is committed. This Bill specifically targets individuals who use unregistered guns because they are untraceable in order to commit crimes. This Bill is not unprecedented.

It would bring ghost guns to the same level of enhancement as using an assault weapon when a felony is committed. California has some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, yet we still experience tragic mass shootings and senseless killing every year. According to the ATF, more than 30% of all guns that law enforcement recovers are considered ghost guns. Individuals who commit crimes hide behind the anonymity of using a ghost gun.

This is a simple gun control Bill that intends to reduce the criminal use of ghost guns. My primary expert witness this morning to speak in support of the Bill is San Joaquin Deputy District Attorney Cindy De Silva.

Good morning, and thank you, Assembly Member Dixon, and good morning, chair and Members. I'm happy to speak in support of this Bill. We do have serial number requirements on firearms for a reason.

They're required by federal law, and they help us identify if the gun has been stolen so we can get it back to the true original owner. They also help us, if it's been used in a crime, to figure out who potentially was the perpetrator. It helps us go back in time and find out where it was purchased from, by whom, what time, when, and what town, et cetera.

So we can put things together and try to figure out how this gun ended up in the chain of commerce, in the stream of commerce, and in the hands of the perpetrator. And crimes are solved that way. It also helps us to determine if the gun was used in a crime at all. And what this measure would do is possession of a firearm without a serial number is only a misdemeanor. That's not a very strenuous legal situation for a person to find themselves in.

What this Bill does, it's rather creative. It only targets the higher level offender who's using it to commit a felony. So while possession of the unserialized firearm is just a misdemeanor, if they actually use it in Commission of a felony, that's when this Bill would kick in. One of the letters in opposition said that we should let financial penalties deter manufacturers of these type of weapons, rather than criminal penalties deter the perpetrators.

But I see no evidence that that would be any more deterring for the manufacturers than the criminal penalties would be. The opposition to these types of measures oftentimes, quote studies that say that penalties and enhancements do not deter crimes, but those studies are subject to their own biases. And there are studies on the other side that say the opposite. I think we're all in favor of using a health care approach to help with gun violence, but it can be a both and.

And I don't see any health measures right now that are protecting against the use of these unserialized firearms, which are one of the crimes confronting law enforcement today. I don't want to speak out of turn. I'm not the author of the Bill, but if we're concerned about having a public health approach, maybe we can do something like a sunset date until that health care approach kicks in, because it has not yet this Bill does something. And so with that, I'll seed the rest of my time.

Thank you. Thank you. I think that's it. I'll turn it. Any other comments?

You know what? I don't have anything else. Kim Stone, on behalf of the District Attorneys Association and enthusiastic support, as is the animal or child or whatever that was along the line, it deterred her from further speaking. Mr. Chair?

I'm sorry. That's my grandson. Any other witnesses in support,

Mr. Chairman Members. Cory Salzillo it. On behalf of the California State Sheriff's Association, in support, Brian Sherman with the Riverside Sheriff Association and all the other POAs I previously mentioned in support. Thank you.

Thank you. Are there any witnesses in opposition? You're ready. Five minutes.

Good morning, chair and Committee Members, I'm still Lesli Caldwell Houston, representing the California Public Defender's office, and I'm here to testify on their behalf in respectful opposition to AB 758. AB 758 proposes yet another sentencing enhancement to our criminal code. While we agree that eliminating ghost guns is a worthy endeavor, this Bill and those of its ilk will not solve the problem of guns, ghost guns, or otherwise diverting our limited resources to imprisoning Californians we know is not a solution.

It is a return to the mass incarceration that we are trying to and succeeding at getting passed. We need to pivot to a public health approach now to the pandemic of guns in our state and our country. This approach would be and has been more cost effective, humane, successful in achieving our goal of reducing guns and gun violence. Adding enhancements of years in prison to crimes is not heard by the audience you seek to reach.

I can tell you that none of the individuals that I represented in my many, many years as a public defender thought ahead of time about how much time they would get for what they were about to do. They don't think that way. People don't think that way. They think about the needs they have due to poverty or violence in their community or health, both physical and mental. When we work together to solve those issues, we can have a more just and safe community.

The Legislature could allow individuals to sue companies that supply or manufacture ghost guns or ghost gun equipment. Serious financial penalties are more likely to slow or stop the flow of ghost guns into our state. We know this in other areas, such as cigarettes, tobacco. Also, this Bill is not needed. There are many laws already on the books that punish the possession of use of a gun in a crime.

These penalties range from a year up to 25 years to life, depending on the seriousness of the offense. We respectfully request your no vote.

Thank you. Are there any other witnesses in opposition?

Thank you. That's okay. Good morning, Mr. Chair and Members Carmen Nicole Cox for ACLU Cal action. ACLU Cal action is opposed to AB 758. Respectfully and in fact, we have a history of opposing policies that seek to ratchet up criminal punishment for conduct that is already a crime. We have been in every hearing of this Committee since this session of the Legislature began singing the harms of sentence enhancements and the elimination of judicial discretion.

AB 758 seeks to do both while we respect the goals of the author and that is to improve the lives of Californians in District 72 and beyond by addressing criminal conduct. As my colleague has said, we know this Bill will not achieve its aim. AB 758 removed the tool from the Justice Toolkit with language that explicitly tells judges they cannot dismiss firearms related enhancements even when it's in the interest of justice.

We are opposed to AB 758 because research indicates that it is the certainty of punishment, not the severity, that best serves as a deterrent. Further, the creation of these redundant crimes contributes to a relentless trend known as over criminalization. Meanwhile, we have not made our community safer or our children healthier.

Even if we are not dissuaded by the racist outcomes known to flow from over criminalization, we should care that over criminalization is expensive, so much so that even conservatives and Republicans have embraced the necessity to balance budgets by reforming the criminal justice system. This reform started in the south, in Texas, where a traditional lock them up approach gave way to a new way of thinking about how best and how economically to protect citizens from criminals.

I'll just note quickly that from 2001 to 2004, Texas experienced a 9% increase in its prison population by seven. It had billions in prison costs and had an incarcerated population that required the building of at least four new prisons. The article, the conservative case for Criminal Justice Reform, reports that the state never built those prisons. Instead, it passed comprehensive criminal justice reform packages that focused on reentry, treatment and diversion programs. These reforms have generated impressive results.

And, in fact, Texas has begun closing prisons, saving billions in taxpayer dollars. Unfortunately, 758 only perpetuates overcriminalization and inordinate spending on the operations of carceral facilities. I'm just going to close by saying AB 758 does the opposite of what it is we should be trying to do. And I ask for the Committee's no vote.

Okay. Any other witnesses in opposition? Seeing none. We'll bring it back to Committee Members. Any questions?

Yeah. I'm supporting this particular measure, Ms. Dixon, because the Legislature should send a very universal condemnation for the use of ghost. You know, there's always this great debate that comes up in this body about the effectiveness and the efficacy of punitive circumstances. But I will tell you, as a person with a degree in special education and the study of behavior modification, there's a reason why timeout works.

There's a reason why punitive measures, if done properly, are effective. And I think that punitive measures deserve to be taught because they're not automatically thought about. And this is what your measure just tries to address and attach behavior with ghost guns, because when you clearly have violated the public trust by using a ghost gun, it's another egregious affront against society. And that's why you deserve to be support on this measure, and you do have my support.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

I'd also like to make some comments. Again, thank you also for bringing this Bill up. And it's unfortunate that we're already trying to chase down guns, let alone now ghost guns. And with the opposition comparing it to tobacco, I don't think that warrants a comparison. And that your clients, they don't think that way when they're committing the crimes. Well, the victims are not also expecting them to be thinking that way also.

And I think if there is nothing as far as a consequence, then it's not going to prevent them from continuing to victimize people. So I will definitely be supporting this. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else?

So I want to thank the author for thinking about issues of gun safety. I'm not going to be supporting the Bill today. I don't believe that penalty enhancements sort of at this level are effective. I agree with the folks from the ACLU on that.

And importantly, if we were going to be doing things like this in this area, I'd want to see support from the major gun safety organizations on the Bill, and I don't see that here. So I won't be supporting it today. Thank you.

Well, thank you, Committee just to reiterate a couple of the points, just to understand how we can create safe communities and criminals are using these guns. There is an act of crime being committed and they intentionally are using ghost guns so they can evade law enforcement. So that's what I'm trying to get at.

And if with this enhancement, and I agree with the public health and rehabilitation you've heard me speak about, that there's nothing more than we want is to have people rehabilitate their lives and let help us help. And I'm all in favor of that. Of course. Actually, an enhancement gives a small enhancement of two years or three years of the Commission of the crime, more time to help rehabilitate the individual. They committed a crime with an illegal weapon.

And that's what I'm trying to get at and control the use of illegal weapons. And further, I don't want to think any of us want to see another senseless killing in our cities when we can take this step to deter the use of ghost guns used in criminal activity. I just want to do everything I can to eliminate the use illegal use of guns. And that's the purpose of this Bill. But I'm very grateful for your thoughts and comments, and I encourage an aye vote, so thank you.

And I believe you sincerely want to do this. Actually, this is one of the items where we're in full agreement that we need to eliminate ghost guns by any means, just about any means necessary. The challenge with this, it goes back to the three strikes. Like, the more people we lock up, the better society will be. And that did not work for a lot of people in my community and in other places.

So while I agree that we need to do more, and it's good to see someone from across the aisle want to get rid of guns, because sometimes it's not always the same. We're usually at opposite ends. So this is refreshing in a lot of ways. And maybe we can continue to talk if this doesn't get out of this, out of this Committee, about what?

The appropriate ways or getting more money for public health related type of help to make sure we can keep those ghost guns out of people's hands. And you're right, we haven't done enough. And we probably need not only do more, but get it done quicker, which where I think you're getting to.

Well, I would appreciate the Committee's reconsideration. I'd be honored. Well, first I got ahead of myself.

Yeah, you don't know what's going to happen with the vote yet. Well, we may not have enough Members. Go call the rolls.

[Roll Call]

Bill Fails, and you're asking for reconsideration?

I am indeed.

Okay. There's no objection. Unanimous consent for reconsideration.

Thank you very much.

As the hours is noon and we all need to get to some meetings right now, we're going to adjourn. Recess. I'm sorry? Recess. Recess. I'm not going to hit the gavel. Recess until 130 across room 127, which is across the hall from this room, and.

All right, well, hey, thank you very much. I did have. Good morning, Mr. Chair Members. Switch around real quick. I'm here today to present AB 890. I want to thank the Committee and the staff for working with me on this measure. AB 890 would essentially require folks granted probation for violations of laws pertaining to fentanyl to take a class developed by the Department of Public Health. It's important to know that current law already mandates education as a condition of parole for these types of crimes.

This one just specifies what kind of education it needs to be. It really creates no additional burdens on the individual on probation. As many of you know, tackling the fentanyl crisis has been a top priority of mine. I'm sincerely trying to approach every single avenue. Yesterday, my woman of the year, honored just yesterday, was Laura Didier, who's in the audience. She lost her son to fentanyl poisoning two years ago. Since that time, she's educated over 50,000 people about the dangers of fentanyl.

One of those people being me. I had absolutely zero idea what fentanyl was until Zach died right in my community as a result of his poisoning. My 10 and 8 year olds already know about the dangers, but it isn't just parents and kids. To my surprise, it is also people currently involved in the criminal justice system. I don't believe in coincidences, but no lie. Laura received this letter from an individual incarcerated just a few days ago.

And I was going to read a lot of excerpts, but I know it's been a long day. But I'll say that this letter is very heartfelt about what this individual has learned from Laura's advocacy and the tragedy of losing her son to fentanyl poisoning. And is really a touching letter. And he doesn't ask for anything. He just wanted her to know how much this education is meant to him.

Because I do believe that some can be changed and helped, and perhaps the dangers and the real world consequences might help folks change their direction, saving lives and also keeping those folks out of prison. Today I welcome Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire and my friend and also inspiration, Boomer Bennett, one of my favorite constituents to testify here in support of AB 890.

A total of five minutes.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, fellow Committee Members. Again, my name is Morgan Gire. I'm the District Attorney of Placer county. Like so many other communities across our state, we've been hit hard with the fentanyl crisis and have seen too many lives taken too early. The devastation of fentanyl, its lethality, combined with its addictive properties, and sadly, its accessibility, has been truly damaging. To meet this challenge, we've launched an aggressive outreach and education campaign across our community.

We've partnered with public health, our treatment providers, and substance use disorder experts, as well as bereaved parents who have lost children to fentanyl poisonings. We've spoken to every high school in Placer County, two assemblies a day, over 30,000 students. We've hit thousands of parents in parent teacher nights, as well as launched a campaign at our middle schools. We've posted billboards, we've wrapped buses, we've put things in inserts.

We've done everything we can to reach as many people as we can about the dangers of fentanyl, reaching those at the epicenter of this crisis, battling addiction, those who distribute in our community, those are who we need to reach. AB 890 does exactly that. It provides critical information and resources to those who have intersected with the criminal justice system. AB 890 will educate everything from its addictive properties to the effectiveness of naloxone to, as we see in the letter, the tragedies of fentanyl.

Our goal is to educate everyone we can, and this Bill enables us to do so in a way that reaches a critical segment of our community. I thank the Committee for your time and respectfully request an aye vote on AB 890. Thank you.

Thank you. Yes, sir.

Thank you guys for having me. I was incarcerated for the majority of my life. My last stint, I did 12 years in California State prison because of drug usage and gang banging and all of the violent things. While being in prison, there wasn't anything like this. There was things that they made you aware, but it lacked the educational perspective. So for me, the reason I adjusted my behavior because I seen from an educational perspective what the harm I was doing to myself and the community.

And because of that, I was able to change my perspective. There are many other individuals who are in prison. I got many friends and family Members who are in prison right now who are lacking the educational perspective of certain things, such as drugs and fentanyl.

Specifically speaking definitely in the African American and Latino communities that are poverty stricken and have economical factors, being able for them to understand, not only do when an individual is given fentanyl to sell the only reason it's used to being sold, because of the profit that you gain from it. So when someone older than me gives it in my hand and says, hey, go sell this, this will give you what you want in regards to money and all those kind of thing.

But it doesn't tell you that. The negative properties of it. From my perspective as an individual who used to be a gang Member and a criminal, if I knew that fentanyl would do what it does to my sister, her son, and killed her son, if I knew that that was a possibility while I'm selling this, I would have that knowledge in my head. I would be informed educationally about the harm that it does, as well as me trying to make money off of it.

And because of that, I think individuals, from an incarcerated perspective, from a probationary perspective, I think giving them the proper education about this matter is one of the most effective things we can do in regards to letting individuals know who think selling fentanyl or any other drug, to think that that's the only way that they have, giving them the educational factor of the damage that it causes, and then giving them the ability to think of which one to choose. Like me, myself, I chose the latter. I chose to forsake that lifestyle and get on board. And that's why I'm talking to you guys here now. So thank you, guys.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Are there any other witnesses in support?

My name is Laura Didier. I'm here in support representing my son Zach, killed at 17 by fentanyl and the empower and resilience project. Thank you.

Thank you, and thank you for being here.

Cindy De Silva, on behalf of the California District Attorneys Association in support.

Stephanie Herrera with the BTS Commission in support.

Thank you. Anyone in opposition? I think she can sit there as long she gets the mic.

Good afternoon. My name is Lesli Caldwell Houston, and I'm here on behalf of the California Public Defenders Association in respectful opposition to parts of AB 890. My heart breaks for the families that have lost family Members because of fentanyl poisoning. My husband and I lost a very dear friend to fentanyl poisoning. He did not know what he was taking. While we completely agree that teaching individuals about fentanyl dangers, we agree with that. We do not agree with charging a fee.

We do not agree that that's the appropriate approach. While the amendment approved removed the explicit authority to charge people a fee to take the program, the resort will be to revert to a pay to take program situation. The Bill does not require explicitly that the programs be free. This means that participant programs will impose a fee, much like other court ordered programs such as anger management courses. They may not say they're charging a fee. They'll call it a sliding scale.

But this rarely, if ever, means no fee. A pay to participate program is problematic because clients can't pay, therefore they don't take the program. Therefore they violate probation, therefore they go back to jail. Further, there's no opt out clause allowing a court to decline to order classes if the defendant's real issue is not drugs, but rather something else, like mental health problems. Ordering a mentally ill defendant to do tangential things is a detriment. Putting too many requirements on those defendants often leads to their failure.

Their failure leads to more incarceration. In my long career, and many of you have seen decade after decade of this drug, this drug heroin, then we had methamphetamine. Now we have fentanyl. Soon we will be hearing about trank. We need to be really careful about how we put these programs together and how we get people into the programs and to successfully complete. For these reasons, we respectfully request your no vote. Thank you.

Thank you. Are there any other witnesses in opposition?

Good afternoon. Glenn Backes for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. The Bill is much improved by the amendments, but until the issue of the fee is dealt with, we remain opposed unless amended. We're opposed to putting fees on defendants and their families because that's who ends up paying them for participation in probation services. We think the education is important, but until we deal with the fee, we align ourselves with the comments of CBDA. Thank you. Any other witnesses in opposition?

We'll bring it back to Committee Members for questions. Mr. Brian and Ms. Bonta, I very much want to support a Joe Patterson Bill. I see your thoughtfulness. I see the way you're growing with all of the stakeholders on these issues to try to make something happen. This particular problem with this Bill is not new to this Bill. In fact, I actually left a testifying judiciary to remove a fee required for parents to reunify with their children. If they can't pay for a program, we're barring reunification.

It's a common punishment on poverty where we impose additional conditions for you to be successful, but then prevent you from being successful because you can't afford them. If we're going to require people to take an education class on fentanyl, we should make sure that it's paid for, particularly if the inability to pay for it could result in them violating their supervision and so I very much hope that you find a way to incorporate that into the work of this Bill. But I would like to see you get out of Committee today.

I would like to see it get out of Committee today with the amendment around the fee payment, for the same reasons that the comments in opposition, or I guess, support, if amended, made. And for Mr. Bryan's proposal, would love to hear from the author why there is an insistence on requiring a fee, and that will definitely help me understand whether or not I'll be able to vote for this.

You know, by the way, we can talk about what we do in Placer County. I think it's never really been in Placer County. We'll take care of that. But obviously, there's, I think, 57 other counties. But I am not insistent that the fee must be paid, and I think the original version of the Bill did have language to have the fee waived by a judge if needed.