Blog

The Los Angeles City Council is to be congratulated on passing an ordinance raising the minimum wage in the city to $15 by 2020. That historic action is an important step in achieving economic justice for so many workers who are forced to hold down two jobs or more and even then find it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. A living wage is a basic economic right, and it is inextricably linked... Read More

Last week wasn’t just a big one for NSA reform – it also found one of California’s largest cities rolling back warrantless surveillance by local law enforcement. With a unanimous vote, the Oakland City Council adopted a privacy policy for its port-centered surveillance project known as the Domain Awareness Center (DAC) and created a new committee to address citywide surveillance reform, including ... Read More

Tomorrow, the Board of State and County Corrections will vote to approve the guidelines for counties seeking state funding for housing, rehabilitation, and treatment services. This decision will largely shape the type of criminal justice system we will have in California. Read More

Relentless advocacy and organizing paid off for Oakland students when the Oakland Unified School Board voted unanimously in support of policies that interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline last month. Read More

The California Senate on June 3, 2015 took a powerful stand for privacy, voting overwhelmingly to approve the California Electronic Communications Privacy Act (CalECPA). Read More

Today Caitlyn Jenner introduced herself to the world in a fabulous Vanity Fair spread. “Call me Caitlyn,” she tells the public in this latest cover story and through her recently launched @Caitlyn­­_Jenner Twitter handle. It is important that people do actually call her Caitlyn. Read More

Across the country communities are rising up to protest police violence and to assert that Black Lives Matter. We stand in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter and with the recent #SayHerName demonstrations about police violence against Black women.In a powerful and inspiring recent display of non-violent civil disobedience, Black women blocked traffic in downtown San Francisco during the morning rus... Read More

The California Healthy Youth Act (AB 329), by Assemblymember Shirley Weber, will update and strengthen existing requirements for HIV prevention education and sexual health education to ensure that students receive education that is accurate, comprehensive, and inclusive. Read More

A growing chorus of elected officials, law enforcement, and community leaders settled on an answer to the senseless deaths of unarmed people of color at the hands of law enforcement: body cameras. And one in four police agencies have already started using them. Read More

Since the death penalty was reinstated in California in 1978, taxpayers have spent over $4 billion to prop up the defunct system. There are currently 750 men and women on death row. Most die of old age, not execution. We hope that California’s leaders will finally tackle this monstrous problem and replace the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole. Read More

Across California, traffic courts are withholding the right to contest a traffic citation until the fines and fees for the citation are paid in full. This unfair practice violates constitutional guarantees of due process and unfairly impacts low-income people. But now there’s been an exciting development that could put an end to this practice once and for all. Chief Justice Cantil-Sakauye has dire... Read More

Today, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Marijuana Policy will host a public forum in Oakland, on the need to protect the health and well-being of youth if marijuana is legalized, taxed, and regulated in California. Read More