Activists target contributions to Dodd campaign

State senator a focal point in push against police-union influence

In late May, after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, protests sprung up in Davis and across the country. In Central Park, an altar of flowers, candles and artwork memorialized Black Americans killed by police. The streets filled with marchers demanding justice.

Police in America kill about 1,000 people per year, according to a database maintained by The Washington Post, but repercussions are rare. Since 2005, fewer than 50 officers nationwide have been convicted of a crime for fatally shooting someone on the job. Only five were convicted of murder.

There is broad public support to make police more accountable. Roughly 80% of Californians favor passing laws to make it easier to prosecute police for violent misconduct, according to a recent poll from UC Berkeley’s Institute for Government Studies.

Despite public opinion, elected officials have dragged their feet on police reform. In response to the summer uprising, California legislators wrote nearly a dozen public safety bills, some of them cheered by Rihanna, Robert De Niro and other celebrities. But on Aug. 31, the final day of California’s legislative session, the Democratic-controlled legislature decided not to call the most significant of the bills for a vote.

Sen. Steven Bradford, D-Gardena, who introduced a bill, SB731, making it possible to decertify police officers fired for misconduct, was blunt about why it failed. “The problem was the union,” he told CNN, referring to police unions that opposed the bill. “It forces people many times to move away from what they truly believe in under intense pressure.”

Criminal justice scholars have identified police unions as one of the biggest obstacles to achieving meaningful reform. Police associations fight for labor benefits like other unions, but they also aggressively protect members accused of misconduct. In recent years, nearly every lawmaker in California’s legislature has accepted donations from law enforcement associations.

Frustrated by police unions’ influence over public policy, activists in Davis and beyond are increasingly calling on elected officials to shun campaign contributions from police groups. So far, their efforts have led at least three California lawmakers and a slate of local and congressional candidates to pledge not to accept money or endorsements from police groups.

At a protest that brought thousands of people into the streets of Davis this summer, an organizer delivered a speech taking aim at the campaign finances of State Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa. “Bill Dodd,” she said, “if you’re out there listening, we’re coming.”

Emily Hill, the founder of Indivisible Yolo, told The Enterprise the grassroots organization has also pressed Dodd in recent months. “He should realize that accepting these donations sends a message to his constituents that he’s open to influence from law enforcement money at exactly the time we are trying to reimagine public safety,” the group said this summer in a public statement.

The focus on Dodd is not incidental. In recent years, he has been among the top recipients of police union money in California’s legislature and has been endorsed by nearly two dozen police associations. This election cycle, Dodd maxed out on contributions from the Peace Officers Research Association of California (PORAC), the largest law enforcement group in the state.

At a virtual town hall in June, a Davis resident asked Dodd if he would pledge not to accept police union money in the future. Dodd demurred. “I have found that the money issue for me does not guide how I make decisions,” he said. “I’ve taken police money, yes, but I vote what I think is right.”

Since Floyd’s death, Dodd has spoken out about the need to confront systemic racism and reform policing. But activists say Dodd’s coziness with donors, his record as a legislator, and his response to police violence in the past call into question his ability to lead on public safety reform.

Police unions

In many states, public sector employees, including police officers, gained collective bargaining rights in the 1960s. Since then, as police union membership grew, the unions have leveraged their influence and financial might to insulate their most abusive members from accountability.  

Contracts police unions secure with local governments often bar investigators from considering past misconduct in disciplinary hearings, require that departments seal disciplinary records and destroy them after a period of time, and guarantee pay and legal representation for suspended officers.

Police advocates say provisions like these are necessary to protect the safety of officers. In a country where gun ownership and mental illness are widespread, officers face stressful and scary situations, which sometimes end tragically. But scholars and activists say the protections are overly broad and serve to keep violent officers on the force.

There is evidence that protections won through police union contracts embolden abusive officers and imperil the communities they are meant to serve. After Florida sheriffs’ deputies unionized in 2003, complaints of violent misconduct jumped 40%, according to a working paper from the University of Chicago.

To preserve these protections, police unions spend heavily on political campaigns and lobbying efforts. PORAC, which represents over 75,000 rank and file officers in California, has spent at least $34 million on state and local campaign contributions in recent decades, according to an investigation by the Guardian. Those contributions open doors for police union lobbyists at the Capitol, who work to block or dilute legislation.

“(PORAC lobbyists) track, promote, shape and work to defeat some of the thousands of bills introduced each year,” PORAC vice-president Brent J. Meyer wrote in a 2017 newsletter. According to a recent study from Stanford University, there is no counterweight to the police lobby, as social justice groups lack the spending power to compete for access to legislators. “No other organization can claim the legislative victories that PORAC has achieved,” the group states in a membership brochure.

Those victories include squashing bills that have overwhelming public support. California is one of just five states that doesn’t have a process to decertify police officers fired for serious misconduct, allowing violent officers to bounce from one department to another. An investigation by The Mercury News found dozens of police officers with criminal records are still working in law enforcement across California.

PORAC and other police unions lobbied hard against Bradford’s decertification bill. “They lit members’ phones up,” Bradford said. According to news reports, union lobbyists proposed new wording to minimize the effects of the bill, but Bradford refused to compromise. “We think that’s what derailed the measure,” said Tom Saggau, a spokesperson for police unions in California.

In addition to lobbying, police unions use bullying tactics to threaten or ridicule those who challenge them. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), a group Dodd’s campaign has taken money from, recently made news after it released an advertisement that placed crosshairs over a photo of Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, D-Los Angeles, a Black lawmaker who pursued police reforms. Elected officials across the country have reported fearing for their safety after they were targeted by police unions.

One way or another, “police unions end up influencing legislators to vote against where the majority of people in California are moving towards,” Irene Kao, Director of the Courage Campaign, a progressive advocacy organization, told The Enterprise.

Other public safety bills that stalled without a vote in August would have expanded public access to police misconduct records, required officers to intervene if they witnessed violent misconduct by another officer, and limited the use of teargas and rubber bullets at protests.

Bill Dodd

After serving on the Napa County Board of Supervisors for 14 years, Dodd switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat and ran for State Assembly in 2014. A social liberal and fiscal conservative, in his own words, he was elected to the State Senate two years later.

Dodd’s supporters describe him as an effective and pragmatic lawmaker, highlighting his business experience, leadership on transportation and water issues, advocacy for affordable public education, and common-sense problem-solving. He recently got a bill passed that allows UC Davis to sell the wine made by viticulture students instead of pouring it down the drain.

His critics, however, say police reform is just another issue on which he has sold out to special interest groups. In 2018, Dodd cut short a hearing on the rights of wildfire survivors to attend a fundraiser for his reelection campaign. Lobbyists for PG&E, the utility company liable for $17 billion for its role in the fires, were also at the fundraiser. Weeks later, the legislature passed Dodd’s wildfire liability bill, SB901, which allowed PG&E to pass on much of that penalty to its customers. Several major newspapers criticized the bill as a bailout.

“I’ve demonstrated my independence over 20 years in public service,” Dodd told The Enterprise in an email. “My guidepost is always the same — to do what is in the best interest of the people.”

Since the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Dodd has condemned racism and police violence. He was among 16 lawmakers who coauthored SB 731. He also helped write bills that would ban chokeholds and would enable mental health professionals to become first responders to 911 calls. He introduced a bill, now signed into law, that mandates that the California Attorney General, instead of local prosecutors, investigate police killings of unarmed civilians.

It isn’t the first time he has backed criminal justice or police reform. Dodd previously voted to ban private prisons in California and to strengthen racial profiling laws that now require police to report data on use of force, civilian complaints and traffic stops.

However, Dodd has also cast votes against reforms. Since 2014, he has voted to keep mandatory sentence enhancements, voted against restoring voting rights to paroled felons, voted against reforming California’s discriminatory gang database, and abstained from voting on a bill that would have required that police release body camera footage within 60 days of a misconduct investigation.

According to the Courage Campaign, those votes likely went against the views of Dodd’s constituents. District 3 has approved every ballot measure for criminal justice reform since 2012, the group reported, voting to ban the death penalty, soften the Three Strikes Law, legalize marijuana and reform juvenile parole.

In a comprehensive analysis of constituents’ and lawmakers’ positions on a range of issues, the Courage Campaign rated the gap between Dodd and his district the widest in the State Senate, a disparity that landed him in the group’s “Hall of Shame.”

“Clearly, policing reform is necessary, and I’m proud to have been a leader in pushing for independent investigations into police shootings, limiting use of force, improving training and decertification of bad officers,” Dodd told The Enterprise. “There is certainly more work ahead.”

Crossing a line

Dodd’s embrace of police donations, coupled with his mixed voting record, is only part of why he has been singled out at protests and called out in town halls. In recent months, activists have raised other transgressions, which they say reinforce their doubts about Dodd’s moral clarity on issues of racial justice and campaign finances.

In addition to receiving police union donations, Dodd’s campaign has accepted contributions from private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic. The companies have profited enormously from the Trump administration’s expansion of immigration detention and have presided over a laundry list of human rights atrocities against the people detained in their facilities, driving some to go on hunger strikes and others to kill themselves.

“It’s hard to imagine a company that is more evil,” said Hill, the Indivisible Yolo founder. “It makes me question whether Dodd has any kind of moral line for who he wouldn’t take money from.”

Racial justice advocates have also brought renewed scrutiny to comments Dodd made following the 2009 killing of Oscar Grant, who was shot while police held him face down on a train platform in Oakland. Johannes Mehserle, the officer who shot and killed Grant, is from Napa, and had played on a youth basketball team that Dodd coached. After the shooting, Dodd spoke to the press multiple times on the Mehserle family’s behalf.

Less than 48 hours after Grant’s burial, Dodd described Mehserle to The Napa Valley Register as a “very kind, caring and gentle person.” In 2011, after serving 11 months of a two-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for killing Grant, Mehserle was granted early release. “Without a doubt, he has done his time,” Dodd told KQED. “Frankly, if you take the history of policemen having these types of things, you can also say that it was an injustice that he ever spent a day in jail.”

Dodd did not specifically answer questions from The Enterprise about his comments on the case. In October, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley announced her office was reopening its investigation of Grant’s death in response to continued demands from his family. “It’s painful,” Grant’s uncle, Cephus X Johnson, said after Mehserle’s release. “We haven’t received any justice.”

During the same years, Dodd appears to have participated in downplaying police violence in his response to another killing. In 2010, a Napa police officer shot a 60-year-old nurse named Richard Poccia in the head during a welfare check at Poccia’s home and left his body in the street for 13 hours. The officers involved were not charged, but the City later settled a wrongful death lawsuit with Poccia’s family for $700,000.

In 2012, a Napa County grand jury that investigated the shooting asked the Board of Supervisors, on which Dodd served at the time, to approve additional funding for emergency mental health services and establish a civilian police review board. The supervisors deemed the recommendations unwarranted, saying police violence was not a local problem. “Napa County is fortunate that there are few (police shootings), and believes that the existing structure to address these incidents is sufficient,” the supervisors wrote.

Since Poccia was killed, law enforcement officers in Napa have fatally shot eight people. The year after the Board of Supervisors declined the grand jury’s recommendations, the Napa Police Officers Association (NPOA) and other law enforcement groups lined up to endorse Dodd for State Assembly. The NPOA donated $500 to his campaign.

Setting a precedent

At his June town hall, Dodd said he has been “pretty darn practical” by taking donations from police unions. Activists say his pragmatism is misplaced. Dodd’s campaign has amassed roughly $2 million for his reelection, of which police union contributions comprise a relatively small amount, and he is running virtually unopposed.

In 2018, Campaign Zero, a project that advocates for ending police violence, analyzed the police reform votes of California lawmakers who took money from police unions. What the group found was not surprising: lawmakers who received more donations from police unions generally voted against reform bills, while those who received less voted more often to pass reforms. Their votes also determined how much they got from police groups for reelection campaigns.

“It seems to me that reform is very difficult when you’ve got to get permission from the people you’re reforming,” Rev. Danté Quick, of Vallejo’s Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, said at Dodd’s town hall. “If the unions can give to politicians — can support campaigns — then the politics is not just about the voters,” he continued. “There is a radical restructuring of our system that has to occur.”

Whether or not Dodd’s own actions or inaction on police reform can be traced to police unions, activists say that setting a precedent by rejecting their money is something all lawmakers can do to reduce the unions’ influence on the legislative process. If Dodd wants to be a leader on racial justice and public safety reform, they say, boycotting police union money is the most practical thing he can do.

“If he’s unwilling to even give that up, then it’s hard for me to see how his constituents can trust him when he says he supports Black Lives Matter,” Hill said. “He’s gonna need to take bolder steps.”

— Reach Caleb Hampton at champton@davisenterprise.net. Follow him on Twitter at @calebmhampton.