Under current California law, more than 20 clearly violent crimes aren’t classified as violent, including rape of an unconscious person, trafficking a child for prostitution, assault with a deadly weapon and domestic violence. You can pimp a child for sex, beat a spouse or rape a young woman who passes...
Law Enforcement Backs Down on Deadly Force Standard—For Now, Anyway
The political landscape in California’s debate over how to curb police shootings shifted Tuesday as law enforcement groups agreed to drop the part of their bill that would lock in the current national standard for justifying the use of deadly force. The move—intended to sustain negotiations on what could be...
California’s War on Plastic Pollution Targets Tiny Hotel Toiletries
Sarah Enemark of Contra Costa County says she doesn’t travel often, but when she does, she typically forgets to bring her own toiletries. So on a recent weekend, chatting outside the bustling lobby of the Hyatt Regency in Sacramento, she sang the praises of those tiny hotel room amenities that...
Lawmakers and Landlords: More Than a Quarter of California Legislators Are Both
In a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of south Sacramento, the property looks like any other on the block: a single-story house that could use a new paint job, a large front yard that could use a little tidying, a chain-link fence circumferencing the lot. The tenants inside have no...
Mental Health 'Catastrophe:' Vanishing Board-and-Care-Homes Leave Residents Few Options
This summer, Tom Gray will lose his home. A slim man with hunched shoulders and a halting voice, Gray, 72, has schizophrenia. Before he landed in Carmen Palarca’s board-and-care home 11 years ago, he spent 20 years living on the streets, many of them huddled in a doorway across from...
Are in-Law Units the Secret Solution to the State’s Housing Shortage?
California lawmakers have pitched dozens of bold, high-profile solutions to California’s affordable housing shortage: billion dollar affordable-housing bonds, revamping the state’s signature environmental protection law, suing NIMBY-inclined cities into permitting more development. But for all the big-picture housing legislation that has actually become law over the past few years, the...
‘Federal Government Really Jacked Us’: How Trump’s Tax Cuts Are Working out for Californians
For communications professor Jason Jarvis and his wife, Jun, California just got more expensive. The Inglewood couple, who last year paid $16,000 in state and local taxes, were only able to deduct $10,000 of it from their federal taxes this year. The federal Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—signed last year...
Charter-Mageddon: Lawmakers Advance a Raft of Union-Backed Charter School Curbs
As charter school advocates rallied en masse and California’s teachers’ unions flexed their political muscle, a cluster of bills that would dramatically curb the growth of charters in the state cleared the Assembly Education Committee on Wednesday. The votes were the first in what figures to be a lengthy, high-stakes...
Factions Take Shape as California Advances Nationally Watched Police Shooting Bill
Even as a landmark California bill meant to prevent police shootings passed its first committee Tuesday, the fault lines among Democrats began to emerge, suggesting the measure will likely change as it moves through the Legislature. How much, though, was not yet clear. After emotional, standing-room-only testimony from Californians whose...
California’s Worsening Wildfires, Explained
If it seems that wildfires are burning nearly all the time these days, that there’s no longer a definable fire season in California, you’re right. Fourteen of the 20 most destructive fires in state history have occurred since 2007, and California has 78 more annual “fire days” now than it had...