News & Commentary

Last week wasn’t just a big one for NSA reform – it also found one of California’s largest cities rolling back warrantless surveillance by local law enforcement. With a unanimous vote, the Oakland City Council adopted a privacy policy for its port-centered surveillance project known as the Domain Awareness Center (DAC) and created a new committee to address citywide surveillance reform, including a potential surveillance ordinance. Oakland’s move represents a sea change in how California communities address surveillance practices that all too often target low-income and people of color. We encourage other communities to follow suit.

Tomorrow, the Board of State and County Corrections will vote to approve the guidelines for counties seeking state funding for housing, rehabilitation, and treatment services. This decision will largely shape the type of criminal justice system we will have in California.

Relentless advocacy and organizing paid off for Oakland students when the Oakland Unified School Board voted unanimously in support of policies that interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline last month.

The California Senate on June 3, 2015 took a powerful stand for privacy, voting overwhelmingly to approve the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA).

Today Caitlyn Jenner introduced herself to the world in a fabulous Vanity Fair spread. “Call me Caitlyn,” she tells the public in this latest cover story and through her recently launched @Caitlyn­­_Jenner Twitter handle. It is important that people do actually call her Caitlyn.

Across the country communities are rising up to protest police violence and to assert that Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and with the recent #SayHerName demonstrations about police violence against Black women.

The California Healthy Youth Act (AB 329), by Assemblymember Shirley Weber, will update and strengthen existing requirements for HIV prevention education and sexual health education to ensure that students receive education that is accurate, comprehensive, and inclusive.

A growing chorus of elected officials, law enforcement, and community leaders settled on an answer to the senseless deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of law enforcement: body cameras. And one in four police agencies have already started using them.

Since the death penalty was reinstated in California in 1978, taxpayers have spent over $4 billion to prop up the defunct system. There are currently 750 men and women on death row. Most die of old age, not execution. We hope that California’s leaders will finally tackle this monstrous problem and replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole.