Here's what's happening in the Bay Area, as curated by KALW news:
Interim SFPD chief credits reforms with peaceful ending to standoff // SF Examiner
"A tense, hours-long standoff between an armed suspect and San Francisco police that shut down streets and rerouted Muni lines in the mid-Market area Wednesday ended without incident.
"Interim Police Chief Toney Chaplin on Wednesday evening credited that resolution with the Police Department’s new reforms, which focus on de-escalation techniques rather than using force. Last month, the Police Commission and San Francisco’s police union tentatively reached between an agreement over the details of new rules governing officers’ use of force."
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Push for police transparency laws gets stuck in Sacramento // SF Chronicle
“A swath of bills dealing with California’s stringent laws protecting the privacy of police officers and the release of information to the public has failed to garner support, leaving the state at a standstill on a troubling public issue that exploded anew this week.
“In Baton Rouge, La., protests erupted Tuesday night after a cell phone video went viral showing two police officers pinning down and fatally shooting a black man that morning.
“The incident, also captured on police body cameras — though the footage was not released — renewed calls across the nation for police transparency and accountability, and comes as California lawmakers have deadlocked on legislation that would have set rules on who should be able to view police body camera footage and when.”
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Judge Rules Hayward Misinterpreted Records Law After Charging $3,247 for Police Body Camera Video // East Bay Express
"An Alameda County judge has ruled that police departments cannot charge fees for redacting body camera video footage. According to government transparency advocates, the ruling, by Judge Evilio Grillo, ensures that police departments can't charge fees that effectively stifle disclosure.
"Alan Schlosser, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California said in a press statement issued today that police departments around the country have adopted body cameras as a post-Ferguson reform intended to increase transparency and accountability. But according to Schlosser, 'exorbitant fees under the [Public Records Act] would undermine those goals and make public access to the best record of what happened when police misconduct is suspected out of reach.'"
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U.S. must release child migrants held in family detention, court says // LA Times
"Obama’s immigration policy was dealt another blow Wednesday when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s opinion that child migrants who are accompanied by a parent and currently in family detention should be quickly released.
"It left the fate of the parents up in the air, however.
"The case centers on a 1997 legal settlement — known as the Flores agreement — that set legal requirements for the housing of children seeking asylum or in the country illegally. In July 2015, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee in Los Angeles found the government had violated key provisions of the court settlement that put restrictions on the detention of migrant children."
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Jail Inmates in Crisis// SF Weekly
"With 35 to 40 percent of inmates needing treatment, the County Jail system is San Francisco's largest mental health facility. And while the inmate population has decreased by up to 8 percent annually since 2008 through alternatives to incarceration and Proposition 47's restructured sentencing for certain crimes, the city has seen no drop in the number of mentally ill people cycling through its jails — and, in turn, its streets.
"'People actually in jail now have more mental illness. That hasn't gone down with the jail population decrease,' said Jennifer K. Johnson, a deputy public defender and co-founder of the Behavioral Health Court, which steers such offenders into treatment instead of incarceration.
"And the majority of those folks end up homeless. From November 2014 to November 2015, 57 percent of the nearly 5,000 county inmates seen by the Jail Behavioral Health Services said they'd experienced homelessness."
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Brooklyn Rises on the Oakland Waterfront // Curbed
"In the most literal sense, Oakland has had a little Brooklyn in it for a long time: In 1856, the settlements of Clinton and San Antonio incorporated into the town of Brooklyn, situated east of Lake Merritt and stretching down to the waterfront, named for a ship that had brought settlers to California. (It was known for its breweries, very Brooklyn.) The town was annexed by Oakland in 1872, but today a new Brooklyn is about to rise on part of the old one, in the form of a 64-acre, $1.5-billion development called Brooklyn Basin that will create an entirely new neighborhood just southeast of the Jack London loft district (home to hundreds of recently built housing units), on two peninsulas of what was most recently port-run land sandwiched between the 880 Freeway and the Oakland Estuary. It will be Oakland's biggest new housing development in many decades."