By : Calmatters – excerpt
Redding Police Chief Brian Barner has long thought it was odd that community service officers are allowed to interview witnesses to crimes, but state law prohibits them from testifying about what they were told.
Instead, gun-carrying officers with arrest powers, he said, have to get pulled off their beats to reinterview each witness and then go to court to recount what the witnesses said.
“It just takes that officer off the street and from doing proactive enforcement and responding to emergency calls,” Barner said in an interview with CalMatters.
So Barner and his colleagues around the state turned to Barner’s state senator, Republican Brian Dahle, who challenged Gov. Gavin Newsom in the 2021 recall election, running on a platform that included slamming Newsom on crime…
Dahle’s bill, SB 804, would amend Proposition 115, the “Crime Victims Justice Reform Act,” passed by voters in 1990. The proposition included a provision that allows for changes with a two-thirds vote of both the Senate and the Assembly, according to a legislative analysis…(more)