Senate Committee Defeats Diluted Police Brutality Bill

The skeleton of a once controversial bill to curb police brutality was defeated by a Senate committee Wednesday, touching off an angry charge that the Legislature is ignoring circumstances that led to the Los Angeles riots.

“I hope to God there isn’t another incident like occurred in South-Central,” the bill’s author, Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), angrily told members of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “God bless you all.”

On a 5-1 vote, the committee scuttled a heavily watered down bill that would have established a standardized form for the filing of citizens’ complaints against peace officers and created a statewide databank on the handling of such complaints.

In its original form, the bill would have taken cases of police brutality away from county district attorneys and turned them over to newly established local special prosecutors.

As such, the measure had been regarded as an important barometer of how seriously the Legislature intended to consider demands for action against brutality.

The Torres legislation, stiffly opposed by influential rank-and-file police unions and some law enforcement management organizations, gained wide attention in the wake of the Rodney G. King beating.

Last month, the law enforcement groups persuaded the Judiciary Committee to amend the measure considerably. The database of police brutality statistics was virtually the only surviving provision.

Even so, the bill was unsatisfactory to the Appropriations Committee. Opponents of the measure contended that in these tough fiscal times, law enforcement departments are too short of money and personnel to collect statistics for the databank.

Torres told the committee after the vote that in spite of the lessons of the King beating and subsequent verdicts, “this Legislature has not responded.”

Later, Torres said he would take the highly unusual step of trying to withdraw the defeated bill from the Appropriations Committee and bring it to the full Senate for a vote.