Posts Tagged: police
News
Landmark legislation to improve California’s notoriously fractured mental-health system has been passed and sent to the governor in the waning days of a chaotic legislative session disrupted by the COVID pandemic. “This package of legislation is a game-changer,” said Maggie Merritt, executive director of the Steinberg Institute.
News
Police response to mental-health calls often ends – again and again – in chaotic, noisy hospital emergency rooms, where staff is stretched thin, and a heart attack is likely to take precedence over someone in the throes of a mental-health crisis. “Traditionally, people would be dropped off at the ER, and the only option was to transfer them to a psychiatric facility,” says Dr. Scott Zeller, a nationally known emergency psychiatrist and former president of the American Association for Emergency Psychiatry.
News
Jackie Fielder is an activist and educator with her sights set on California’s 11th Senate District, hoping in an uphill race to topple incumbent state Sen. Scott Wiener, a fellow Democrat. Fielder is young (25), educated (Stanford University), a person of color (both Native American and Latina), an environmental protester and an activist with a background in grassroots organizing. She describes herself as a Democratic Socialist.
News
But one week into the lockdown, epidemiologists tracking rates of transmission in California and the United States worry that Newsom’s shelter-in-place order will be less effective in controlling new infections without stronger enforcement.
News
California’s 84 rape crisis centers are in a funding crisis. While California has experienced a steady rise in the number of reported rapes (over 5% per year since 2015), the state’s annual General Fund contribution to rape crisis centers over the past decade has been a miniscule $45,000.
News
The administration plans to modify an existing tax on phone calls to include a flat fee — estimated initially at 34 cents per line — on cellphones, landlines and other devices capable of contacting 911. More than $175 million is expected to generate from this in the first year, with the possibility of growing to $400 million in later years.
Opinion
OPINION: California’s Assembly Bill 931, which would modify the state legal standard governing police officers’ use of deadly force, is a promising advance on existing law, but the current proposal is deeply flawed. To meaningfully reform police practices and properly regulate the use of deadly force, some significant amendments are necessary.
News
A bill by state Sen. Steven Glazer, D-Orinda, giving new state workers the option new University of California workers received two years ago, a 401(k)-style plan rather than a pension, is opposed by unions and soon may be opposed by CalPERS. More than a third of eligible new UC employees have chosen a 401(k)-style plan. Instead of a guaranteed lifetime monthly pension check, the 401(k) plan that replaced pensions in most of the private sector uses individual tax-deferred investments to build a retirement fund.
News
If you don’t give city employees a pension, what happens? San Diegans voted five years ago this month to switch all new city hires, except police, from pensions to 401(k)-style individual investment plans, becoming one of the first big cities to take the plunge.
News
Calpensions: New annual CalPERS reports no longer prominently display the pension debt of local governments as a percentage of pay, making it more difficult for the public to easily see the full employer pension cost.
The state Capitol in Sacramento, the seat of California government. (Photo: Always Wanderlust, via Shutterstock)
