by Tracy Rosenberg
The 2025 California state legislative session wrapped up on October 13, 2025. As Berkeley Speaks readers know, we are in a time of a severe backlash to the justice concerns raised so effectively in the earlier years of this decade, by Black Lives Matter and many others. Paradoxically, this backlash is occurring exactly as the rogue federal administration under Donald Trump is clearly demonstrating the harm that abusive policing and surveillance bring to our people.
These competing currents were battling all year long as the 121 elected state legislators and the state’s governor considered some 3,000 proposed laws. Three trends were clear in the arena of criminal justice reform.
- Modest, but significant bills successfully became law.
- Legislators proposed bills to dismantle pretty much every substantive reform of the past five to ten years, but these bills largely did not succeed.
- More ambitious system change proposals did not find broad support, as the backlash continues.
In this article, we’ll touch on a few examples of each of these trends.
Advances for Criminal Justice Reform
Targeted, tightly focused criminal justice reform bills were able to pass through the backlash when shepherded by experienced legislators, although they all experienced some rocky times along the way. Assembly Bill 572 by Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) was spearheaded by Silicon Valley De-Bug, a grassroots non-profit organization. The bill protects family members after a person has been killed or gravely injured by police officers. AB 572 requires law enforcement and prosecutors to inform family members of the condition of the person prior to any interrogation, and to inform them that they can have a support person or attorney present. As does the Miranda warning for people who are arrested, AB 527 constrains the police from leveraging the grief of family members for information that might benefit a killer cop or smear a victim.
Assembly Bill 847 by Dr. La Shae Sharp-Collins (D-San Diego). AB 847 was put forward by the Los Angeles Sheriff Oversight Commission and grants civilian oversight bodies (including the Berkeley Police Accountability Board) access to confidential law enforcement personnel records when the oversight body is investigating the conduct of those officers. The bill makes the records available to a closed session meeting of the oversight body.
Assembly Bill 1388 by Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles) came about as a result of a sweeping expose in the San Francisco Chronicle by reporter Katey Rusch, which focused on settlements between officers and law enforcement agencies that concealed or destroyed the records of a misconduct investigation. The bill bans such agreements going forward. The Chronicle’s extensive article showed that these“clean-record agreements”are broadly used, and made such a compelling case that the usual law enforcement pushback was not able to derail the bill. This is an example of the power of the press when the press chooses to use it.
Failed Attempts to Overturn Criminal Justice Reform
While the law enforcement lobbyists could not stop the three bills above, they had their own irons in the fire. Three proposals were initiated to gut three critical reform laws:
- Assembly Bill 284 (Alanis R-Modesto) targeted RIPA, the Racial Identity Profiling Act, which requires annual reports on racial disparities in police stops.
- Assembly Bill 1178 (Pacheco D-Whitter) threatened former Senator Nancy Skinner’s SB 1421 and SB 16, which made some police misconduct records obtainable as public records.
- Senate Bill 734 (Caballero D-Merced) targeted the Racial Justice Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in criminal convictions and sentences.
Given the backlash. these were serious threats, but intense advocacy neutralized all three of them. AB 284 stalled and the other two were stripped of most of their provisions in the Legislature’s public safety committees. The final bills did not weaken the original laws they were aimed at. Similarly, other bills intended to strengthen law enforcement’s asset forfeiture capabilities and gut municipal sanctuary city ordinances failed to advance.
Defeats for Systemic Criminal Justice Reform
Finally, more ambitious criminal justice efforts that sought broader systemic changes fell prey to a general unwillingness to stand up to misleading “tough-on-crime” rhetoric and policies.
During the final 13-hour session on September 13 2025, Assembly Bill 1231 (Elhawary D-Los Angeles) was taken down by law enforcement lobbyists on its “concurrence” vote, (The bill was previously passed by both the Assembly and the Senate, the two legislative houses. Concurrence is the process used when a bill returns to its original house for ratification of amendments made in the other house.) It is supposed to be a pro forma process, but it was not this time. AB 1231 would have made diversion possible for people convicted of nonviolent felonies if a judge felt it to be appropriate, keeping people out of the jail and prison system. Elhawary did not pull her punches as the bill went down, calling out the lying from law enforcement lobbyists, but to no avail.
The same night, a bill that would have significantly tightened the rules for the use of automated license plate readers by the police hung on the Assembly floor for about seven hours, before finally sliding through at 12:39 in the morning, only to be vetoed by Governor Newsom two weeks later. Senate Bill 274 (Cervantes D-Riverside) would have required all license plate reader searches to be connected to a current California case number and ensured that the “hot lists” cops use to ping the machines were from bona fide sources. One day after Senate Bill 274 was vetoed by the governor, Attorney General Rob Bonta announced a lawsuit to enforce existing license plate reader state law against the police department in El Cajon. The El Cajon lawsuit was the first-ever state action to enforce the 2016 law, which has been broadly and serially violated for the past nine years.
As 2026 looms, it is an open question how much the ongoing rampant militarization coming from the feds will impact the public safety conversation in the California state capital. Early indicators are that the question of “what actually keeps us safe” will continue to be debated even as we draw closer to a police state. Stay in touch with groups like the Anti-Police Terror Project, Ella Baker Center, CURYJ, Silicon Valley De-Bug, ACLU and Oakland Privacy to find out how you can help beat back the backlash and slow down the dystopia.
Tracy Rosenberg is the advocacy director at Oakland Privacy. Visit https://oaklandprivacy.org