ICE agents have reportedly claimed to be police officers to gain consent to enter a person’s home – a tactic that is viewed as unethical, but within the powers granted to the officers. Civil rights groups supported Kalra’s bill, looking to stymie the Trump administration’s promise to use any and all available tools to deport undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes. Many groups fear Trump will expand deportations to include all undocumented immigrants, their families and relatives.   read more

California has agreed to pursue a single-drug solution to its vexing problem. But first, the state must wait for the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in an Oklahoma case where the three-drug method is on trial. A decision is expected later this month. Then the state has 120 days to propose its solution. Whichever way the high court rules, more lawsuits are expected over any California proposal.   read more

Schwarzenegger slashed Esteban Nuñez’s 17-year prison sentence for manslaughter to 7 years, but did not give advance notice to the prosecutor or family of the victim, as is the custom in commutations and the law in paroles. The governor signed the commutation on December 30, 2009, and announced it hours before he left office three days later.   read more

Water agencies have won the same level of confidentiality about their pumping activities that the law accords residential and commercial users. That 1997 law, passed six years after the media publicly shamed Silicon Valley water users during a drought, made the information private. “We’re going to finally regulate and monitor groundwater, and we’re going to keep it all secret,” James Wheaton, legal director of the Oakland-based Environmental Law Foundation, told CIR.   read more

The state Assembly passed legislation last week that would give an official nod to a practice explicitly illegal in the other 49 states, but unofficially tolerated in California. Under the law, motorcyclists could drive between lanes as long as they were traveling under 50 mph and don’t exceed the speed of cars by 15 mph. Lane-splitting is a time-honored tradition on California roads, with unofficial guidelines approved of by the California Highway Patrol (CHP).   read more

Ars Technica said county lawyers indicated to them that the “pen register and trap and trace order” applications submitted to the judge were warrant requests, which they are not. The pen register “template is likely to mislead judges who receive applications based on it because it gives no indication that the Sheriff’s Department intends to use a stingray,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Nathan Wessler told the publication.   read more

Alameda is the first county in the nation to make drug manufacturers pay at least a part of the cost of encouraging people to do the right thing and giving them a means to do it. That means setting up collection points for prescription drugs, publicizing the locations and disposing of the drugs.   read more

Only 5.8% of the women in San Francisco are African American, but they are 45.5% of all the female arrests in the city, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. That continues a disparity that increased dramatically in the 1980s before leveling off around 2008. Black arrests per 100,000 women is 13.4 times the rate of non-blacks, compared to a 4.1 in 1980. But, surprisingly, those numbers are not telling a tale of increased black female crime. Just the opposite is true.   read more

Kim was chief deputy director of operations at the Department of Public Health. His new department oversees about $9 billion in procurements throughout the government each year. It manages tens of millions of square feet of office and warehouse space, buys and sells real estate, oversees 50,000 vehicles in the state’s vehicle fleet and purchases $3 billion worth of insurance annually.   read more

Fines ranging from $50,000 to $100,000 were meted out to medical centers in nine counties for incidents including the improper administering of medication tubes, surgical materials left behind in a patient and a burned baby. Some of the cases are old—one dates back to 2011—but have only recently been closed.   read more

Tanishq, 11, picked up three associate degrees from American River College (ARC) in math and physical science, general science and language studies. He only spent a year in college. Tanishq was home-schooled early on by his mother, who reportedly put her own Ph.D. pursuits on hold, and began taking classes at ARC when he was 7. He graduated from high school with a 4.0 GPA when he was 10, but had already accumulated enough college credits to finish ARC quickly.   read more

Neville, 38, takes over the nonpartisan research service that assists the governor and his staff, the Legislature and other select state officials prepare reports and memoranda on policy issues. The bureau, which is part of the California State Library, also works on special projects, like the 2013 Women Veteran Survey, and regularly publishes “Studies in the News.”   read more

America’s Health Rankings from the UnitedHealth Foundation said California’s 65-and-older crowd dropped 11 spots, to 29th place among the states, on the strength of a 23% increase in chronic drinking (from 4.3% to 5.3%) and a two-year 29% decrease in physical activity. But it takes more than being inebriated and immobile to nab you a below-average spot on the list.   read more

Researchers concluded that the loss of coverage resulted in 1,800 additional trips to emergency rooms in the state. Dental care in ERs is not good. For the most part, it consists of antibiotics and pain killers; not a very good health outcome. The study’s lead author, Astha Singhal, said, “The major takeaway [from the study] is that there are unintended consequences that need to be evaluated when you make policy decisions.”   read more

State lawmakers are considering legislation, Assembly Bill 775, which would require the centers, some licensed medical facilities and some not, to be more forthcoming. If they are licensed, they would have to tell patients about the availability of birth control, abortion and prenatal care. If they aren’t licensed, they have to say so and let patients know about the things they don’t offer.   read more

Los Angeles County is served by 228 government and private community water systems. Seventy-five percent of them suffer from at least one vulnerability sufficient to put its users at risk. That includes “dependency on a single type of water source, local groundwater contamination, small size, or a projected increase in extreme heat days over the coming decades.”   read more

So far, the deal affects only about 1,000 farmers with riparian water rights—direct access to running water in streams and rivers. In exchange for farmers fallowing 25% of their fields or using 25% less water, the state agrees not to do the unthinkable and challenge their senior water rights before the growing season is over. Not every farmer in the area is expected to sign up for the deal, so that fight might still be coming if the state tries to cut them back―or off.   read more