California Lawmakers Fight Back Against Trump’s Secret Police Force

The Senator of the State of California Scott Wiener (D-13th District) is on a mission to slow down the new American secret police. His bill, the No Secret Police Act (SB 627), would make illegal for law enforcement agents to wear masks while proceeding, in most cases, and would allow local police and sheriffs to intervene if they did. “We must suffocate this in the egg and specify that it is not normal to do secret police services,” said Wiener. His colleague Renée Pérez presented a company bill, the non -vigilant law (SB 805), which forces agents of the police to identify correctly.

“The fact of masked agents of the application of laws that run, mainly with ski masks, grasp people and throw them in unmarked cars is terrifying,” said Wiener. “This is the opposite of what a free society is supposed to be. We do not do a secret police in this country – and that is what emerges. ” Add the stories of vigilants and criminals to the mixture to pretend to be masked federal agents to perform their dirty work, and Wiener says that we have the creation of a calamity. He also worries that if the secret police methods are normalizing at the federal level, they will end up adapting to the police and local.

“I work in close collaboration with our state and our local police forces. They just do a huge job, and I want to make sure it remains like this, “he said. “But what the federal government is doing at the moment is so harmful, and I fear that it can have effects on the culture of the police.

His bill and Pérez have provided considerable support in recent weeks, including the action of prosecutors focused on the reform, directed by Cristine Soto Deberry, former chief of staff of the former prosecutor of the district of San Francisco, George Gascon and Chesa Boudin. Deberry told me that when masked agents enter the communities and systematically violate the rights of the residents of the fourth amendment, it is “incredibly difficult for prosecutors to continue criminal affairs” against those arrested during this procedure, because the arrests themselves are so tainted.

Wiener is aware that even if the California legislative assembly adopts its bill, which is debated by the Assembly this week and will probably be adopted by the Senate next week, and the Pérez bill, it will be a difficult battle to apply them given the feeling of impunity with which the federal agencies are currently operating. But he says it is a fight worth being. “The application here is not easy or simple,” he says. “But we have to try and we have to do what we can do.”

The bill was carefully formulated to apply for all The law enforcement agents, and not only federal agents – that Wiener and Deberry believe they isolate him from judicial disputes, as the states are, historically, to the important margins on how to control their own police functions.

New York legislators debate a similar bill, as are their colleagues from Illinois. Meanwhile, members of the City of Evanston, Illinois, presented an anti-masking resolution. These bills and resolutions could provide models to democratic legislators and municipal councils across the country. They could also accelerate legal confrontations between the authorities of the city, the state and the federal.

If the California bill is adopted by a majority of two thirds – a probable scenario given the supermajority of the Democrats in the two chambers – its provisions will be immediately hampered; If it only goes through a simple majority, legislation will only take effect until January. Be that as it may, he will provide essential ammunition to the Golden State in his fight against an increasingly soggy federal administration.

Once the law is on local DAS and police services to launch criminal investigations, with assignment powers, if unidentified masked agents continue to terrorize their communities. They will be able to request documents of ice personnel and other federal agencies, showing newspapers showing that was in service, and other information allowing them to determine who are men and women behind masks. And they will be able to ask for charges of small jury against officers who have committed illegal acts.

A recent incident in San Bernadino highlights the reason why such a law is necessary. Masked immigration officers fired in a car with a family inside while trying to remove the driver from the vehicle and warn him. The family managed to escape and go home, where they called the local police. In the dead end, dozens of community members showed up to protect the family, while the television teams filmed the confrontation. If the SB 627 was in place, the San Bernardino police would have been authorized to arrest the federal agents, and the local DA would also have been authorized to open an investigation into the use of excessive force and the hiding place of the identities of the federal agents. Under the law, residents could also have laid down a civil affair against their masked attackers.

For Deberry, what happened in San Bernardino should be something that the federals themselves survey – masked agents using excessive and potentially fatal force, against unarmed residents. But, of course, in the Trump era, such federal surveys will not occur. Trump himself told the police to be “extraordinarily rudy” in his anti-crime and anti-immigrant repressions.

“There is no federal response to blatant behavior,” says Deberry, “and [lawmakers] must determine how to enter this gap. »»

SB 627 and SB 805 are not, by any stretch of imagination, panaceas. But at a time when the secret police practices of dictatorships are largely imported into the United States by a grass caudillo, they give at least Californians some additional protections against the predations of the hunters of immigrants without law of Trump.