Every Sunday we put our faith into action and this week we invite you to support SB 731 — a bill in the California State Legislature that will set up a process whereby police officers who abuse their authority and are fired by their police department will also be professionally decertified and prevented from serving as police officers anywhere else in California.

California is one of only five states that has no process to decertify abusive police. Decertification ensures those police cannot be hired as officers somewhere else. Over 200 other professions in California have licenses that can be revoked if they violate their licensing rules. California gives police officers a license to kill without the ability to revoke it if they abuse their authority.

Over the last few weeks, hundreds of thousands of Californians have taken to the streets to demand an end to police brutality. Addressing police violence requires re-examining the role of police in our society, and re-imagining how to advance public safety by investing in resources for mental health, domestic violence and other crisis response that do not involve law enforcement. But we still need to hold police officers accountable for abuse.

Community organizations like the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, Anti Police-Terror Project, Black Lives Matter California, California Families United 4 Justice, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice, PolicyLink, STOP Coalition, and Youth Justice Coalition are mobilizing to stop these abusive police by cosponsoring SB 731, the Kenneth Ross Jr. Police Decertification Act. California must create a process to remove abusive police from the streets to protect the people of California and in particular those who are often most targeted by police violence: People of color, LGBTQ individuals, the homeless and those with mental disabilities.

SB 731 will improve community safety by keeping officers who commit misconduct off the streets by:

• Establishing a statewide process to automatically decertify officers who are fired for specified misconduct such as excessive force, sexual misconduct and dishonesty.
• Giving the California Department of Justice the power to independently investigate allegations of misconduct and decertify those officers who resign before they are fired.
• Requiring local law enforcement to report fired officers to the state and ensure that during the hiring process California law enforcement agencies contact the state to find out why an officer left their previous positions.
• Adding officers who are decertified to the National Decertification Index (NDI), a national database that tracks decertified officers across state lines.

SB 731 also strengthens California’s civil rights law, the Bane Act, by removing the requirement that victims of police violence prove that officers had specific intent to violate their civil rights – an impossible bar for most cases. SB 731 would restore the burden of proof to general intent, lowering the barrier for families to seek justice. This bill will also clarify that a wrongful death at the hands of police may violate the Bane Act, allowing families to avoid federal courts and qualified immunity.

Now is the time for California to act to join the 44 other states with the power to remove abusive police from their communities and give families the opportunity to hold police officers accountable when they violate their civil rights.

Tell your legislator to support SB 731 and keep abusive officers off our streets.