When it comes to California attorneys general, the new boss is the same as the old boss who is the same as the even older boss.
That’s especially true regarding the state’s police-oversight laws, where the last three Democrats in charge — current AG Rob Bonta, 2026 gubernatorial nominee Xavier Becerra and former Vice President Kamala Harris — have operated in a manner that would be indistinguishable from the behavior of any garden-variety law-and-order Republican.
What’s really disappointing is that Bonta had promised to be much better, as he had run on a campaign that included improving accountability for misbehaving officers and promoting modest but useful criminal-justice reforms.
Harris, who served in the post from 2011 to 2017, was closely allied with the state’s police unions and, as one New York Times column in 2019 explained, she even “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct.” She was replaced by Becerra, who was ultimately in charge of enforcing a 2020 state law that provides California Department of Justice oversight of police use-of-force incidents when local agencies request it.
As this Editorial Board explained in 2021, Becerra lobbied against it, citing budget concerns. The Newsom administration provided $13 million in extra cash, but Becerra still dragged his feet. His department also flouted a separate accountability law that required agencies to release some police disciplinary records. Becerra refused to release them and filed legal challenges and threatened to sue reporters who legally obtained records from his office. He backed down, but still.
We understand police officers have a difficult job, but they need to be held to the highest standards. Officers who engage in misconduct should be removed from their positions and decertified so they don’t just move to other departments. Records involving grievous abuse of the public should be released as a means to protect the public. Most Californians no doubt agree with these concepts.
Now fast forward to the present. A recent investigation from CalMatters reported that under Bonta, “Investigations into fatal shootings by California police take so long that officers often cannot be decertified or charged with most crimes.” Bonta, it added, promised to close shooting investigations within a year, but “the average investigation takes nearly two years and five months.”
Some investigations took more than three years, which takes the matter beyond the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution and for decertification.
The California DOJ essentially renders the recent police-reform laws useless. The department itself blames a lack of funding. As CalMatters noted, “On its first investigation, program investigators were already complaining that they were undermanned.”
Bonta is a progressive Democrat and these editorial pages are libertarian, but despite our deep and obvious policy differences with him we endorsed him for attorney general in 2022 in large part because he “championed police-accountability measures and advanced sensible criminal-justice reforms.” After all, an attorney general’s view about, say, taxation or healthcare is far less relevant to the job than the AG’s commitment to crime-fighting and police accountability.
As an Assembly member, Bonta did in fact author and support various criminal-justice reforms that suggested he might take a much better tack as California’s leading prosecutor. But the CalMatters investigation suggests it’s just the same old, same old.
Whether it requires better management, more funding or some combination, AG Bonta, the state DOJ and the California Legislature must step up on the sort of police oversight the public expects.