Monday was the final day of the legislative session, and thus the final day for California lawmakers to shuttle bills off the house floors and onto Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk. This was made more difficult by coronavirus-related delays that first eliminated two months, then a handful of the very last workdays before the legislative cutoff for passing bills.
And while the Senate and Assembly sent approximately 200 bills to Newsom on Monday, many bills, including important criminal justice reforms proposed in response to protests over police killings, were abandoned when the clock struck midnight.
In spite of decades of struggle to achieve equality at work and at home, women continue to perform more than their share of caregiving, both paid and unpaid – and when that woman is a spouse or mother of the person she's caring for, it's as if her labor doesn't even exist.
A perfect example of this is the frontline-working women of California's In-Home Supportive Services program. IHSS allows low-income seniors and people with disabilities to employ the caregiver of their choice in order to live independently in their homes, at a fraction of the cost of institutionalized care. About 22% of IHSS workers are parent or spouse providers, almost exclusively mothers and wives, providing long-term care to spouses or disabled children.
(Sacramento) –A bill to establish a pilot program to have community-based organizations serve as first responders instead of the police awaits only Governor Gavin Newsom’s signature.
The legislation, AB 2054 – the CRISES Act – authored by Assemblymember Sydney Kamlager (D-Los Angeles), passed both houses of the California legislature with nearly unanimous and bipartisan support. The bill is co-sponsored by 13 organizations and includes family members of individuals killed by police, advocates, and experts in non-police responses to crises.
California is on the road to changing policing. And recent reform bills in the works with the state legislature are paving the way, with an August 31st deadline approaching.
Assembly Bill 2054, also known as the CRISES act, would provide responses to emergency situations that would typically be routed to police departments, such as mental health crises, intimate partner violence, and substance use. The CRISES act was introduced by Assemblymember Sydney Kamlager of Los Angeles.
Senate Bill 731, introduced by Senator Steven Bradford of Gardena, would decertify police officers deemed unfit. This includes officers who have shot and killed or seriously injured another person.
With less than a week left in the current legislative session, California lawmakers are rushing to advance a series of bills on police force, including ones that would ban officers from administering chokeholds and firing tear gas at protesters and others that would boost accountability by making more law enforcement records open to public disclosure.
(Sacramento) – Today the California State Senate passed a bill to limit adult probation to a maximum of one year for misdemeanor offenses and two years for felony offenses. The bill passed out of the Senate with an 26-12 vote.
Existing law authorizes courts to enforce misdemeanor probation terms for a maximum of three years. Felony probation may be enforced for as long as the maximum possible prison sentence for the offense.
(LOS ANGELES) — Gwen Moore left the California Assembly in 1994 after more than a decade of accomplishments as a Democrat, including serving as the powerful Majority Whip and authoring the 1984 landmark Moore Universal Service Telephone Act, which required the state’s Public Utilities Commission to provide low-income households with access to affordable telephone service.
The Moore Act still is with us, although Moore sadly isn’t. Gwen died on Aug. 19 at age 79.
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