Tagged With "Police"

By Susan Abram, The Chronicle of Social Change, January 6, 2020 As a 10th grader at Sacramento’s Luther Burbank High School, Stephanie Lopez remembers when she saw a school resource officer treat her brother like a criminal. Her brother had bumped into the officer and apologized, Lopez said. But the officer proceeded to question him and asked him for his ID. “It was all new to me,” said Lopez, now 17 and a senior, of the aggressive approach the officer used with her brother. “When I was...

When Officer John Hampton of the San Bruno Police Department in San Bruno, CA, first heard that mindfulness training was being offered to him and his fellow cops, he had two reactions. John Hampton “I think my major reaction was: ‘Oh, there’s some hippy thing that they’re trying to get cops to do,’” he said. “When I say that, it’s funny because that’s not my voice. It’s the caricature of a police officer-like voice. In the back of my mind, I was interested and open to it, but that police...

By Theresa Clift, The Sacramento Bee, June 16, 2020 The leader of a citizen commission tasked with helping the Sacramento City Council decide how to spend tens of millions of dollars in new sales tax money is claiming the commission has been excluded from the process. And she wants nearly $50 million in tax dollars headed to the police department budget to be shifted instead toward economic development, affordable housing and homelessness initiatives. Flojaune Cofer, chairwoman of the...