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Editorial: Shirley Weber is our 2019 San Diegan of the Year

Getting a law enacted that limits when police can use lethal force is a staggering accomplishment.

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In 2017, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board gave the distinction to 20 people who died during an avoidable hepatitis A outbreak. In 2018, we honored U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw. This year, our choice was even clearer. Our 2019 San Diegan of the Year is Assemblywoman Shirley Weber.

In crafting a state law that sets a stricter standard for when police may use lethal force, Weber has fashioned the most powerful response yet to the grim and all too frequent U.S. phenomenon of civilians, often young African-American men, being killed nationwide by police officers in dubious circumstances. Amazingly, she did it in a unifying way.

Other San Diegans certainly stood out this year. Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein showed grace under literal gunfire during the April attack on the Chabad of Poway that left one dead. Patrick Henry High School graduate Melissa Berton won an Academy Award for “Period. End of Sentence.” — a documentary about women in rural India who make and sell sanitary pads to break taboos about menstruation. Students at San Ysidro High School lost access to school buses because of grotesque fiscal mismanagement in the Sweetwater Union High School District and had to walk six miles round-trip to get to school. Former San Diego State star athletes Kawhi Leonard and Stephen Strasburg were MVPs of this year’s NBA Finals and World Series, respectively.

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But the accomplishment of Weber — a former San Diego school board member and San Diego State professor born 71 years ago to sharecroppers in Hope, Arkansas — was impossible to top.

Common ground seemed highly unlikely. On one side were the police and their supporters, many of whom believe most police killings are justified because officers are making split-second life-and-death decisions. On the other side were activists and families who have lost loved ones, many of whom believe most police killings are executions — even after the Obama administration concluded this decade’s most high-profile such case, of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, was justified.

Into this divide, Weber introduced Assembly Bill 392. “It was clear that something had to be done,” she told an editorial writer this week. “I wanted to challenge people to do what was right.” She also never wanted to have “that conversation” with her young grandsons, Kadir and Jalil, about how they should act around police to avoid violence. Her bill specified that deadly force could only be used by police officers when it was necessary to prevent imminent death or serious injury to an officer or another person. The vague standard it was meant to replace held that officers could use lethal force if they concluded it was “objectively reasonable.”

Weber could have focused on her fellow Democrats, who hold large majorities in the Legislature. Instead, she set out to win over all lawmakers and law enforcement groups with a “simple and consistent” message: Cities where police adopted stricter standards for use of force — such as San Francisco, Stockton and Seattle — saw the number of violent police incidents plunge without any evidence that the safety of the public or of officers was diminished.

The bill was denounced for setting an “impossible” standard for officers. But after minor changes, most police groups dropped opposition. It passed 68-0 in the Assembly and 34-3 in the Senate, and in August, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it into law.

The measure still has its skeptics. Some say changing the use of force standard won’t matter, given how reluctant most local prosecutors are to charge officers, or because the big picture of race in America hasn’t changed. But think of the effort required to change an institution like law enforcement. Weber has forcefully pushed this institution in the right direction in ways that will keep people alive and consequently improve law enforcement’s reputation. In the polarized America of 2019, this is a giant accomplishment. Thank you, Dr. Weber.

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