California Agencies Want Legislation to Reduce Court Time for Officers

To keep more police on patrols, law enforcement groups in California would like officers to spend less time in court. Legislation would allow non-sworn community service officers to testify in preliminary hearings instead of police.

Redding Police Chief Brian Barner has long thought it was odd that community service officers are allowed to interview witnesses to crimes, but state law prohibits them from testifying about what they were told.

Instead, sworn have to get pulled off from their assignments to reinterview each witness and then go to court to recount what the witnesses said.

“It just takes that officer off the street and from doing proactive enforcement and responding to emergency calls,” Barner told CalMatters in an interview with CalMatters.

So Barner and his colleagues around the state turned to Barner’s state senator, Republican Brian Dahle. They asked Dahle to ease the burden on the state’s shrinking police forces by allowing community service officers — uniformed police department civilian employees who don’t have arrest powers — to testify at preliminary hearings.

On Tuesday, the Senate’s Public Safety Committee grudgingly passed Dahle’s second attempt at a bill, over opposition from the ACLU, police-reform advocates and criminal defense attorneys.