Newsom Orders State to Stop Teaching Controversial Police Stranglehold

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered the state police regulatory agency to stop training officers on how to use a hold that can block the flow of blood to the brain.

Newsom said he is “immediately directing” the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) to stop teaching the practice in its curriculum, and is supporting proposed legislation to ban the practice in California. The decision on using the hold is currently up to police agencies.

“We train techniques on strangleholds that put people’s lives at risk,” Newsom said during a press conference at the California Museum’s Unity Center in Sacramento. “That has no place any longer in 21st century practices and policing.”

It marked his first action on police use of force following two weeks of protests across the country over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd died on Memorial Day after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while he was handcuffed and lying face-down on the ground.

Since then, there have been a cascade of calls around the country for police to review their use-of-force policies. The San Diego Police Department and San Diego County Sheriff’s Department are among the agencies that announced they would stop using the carotid hold, named because it applies pressure to the carotid arteries that supply blood to the brain.

“At the end of the day, a carotid hold that literally is designed to stop people’s blood from flowing into their brain, that has no place any longer in 21st century practices and policing,” Newsom said.

Newsom also called on the Legislature to set standards for crowd control and police use of force during protests.

“We are not seeing people treated equally all across the state of California,” he said, vowing to work with the state’s Legislative Black Caucus, national experts, community leaders and law enforcement officials to craft a proposal. “We need to standardize those approaches.”

Newsom noted that police in California and elsewhere have resorted to using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds during the current protests against police brutality.

“One thing that is crystal clear to me [is] that protesters have the right not to be harassed,” Newsom noted. “Protesters have the right to protest peacefully … without being arrested, gassed, shot at by projectiles.”

Last year, Newsom signed a landmark bill that limits police use of lethal force to defending against an imminent threat of death or serious injury to officers or bystanders. The old standard allowed officers to use lethal force if they had a “reasonable fear,” which made it rare for an officer to be charged or convicted.

That law was prompted by the 2018 fatal police shooting in Sacramento of Stephon Clark, who was black. Newsom spent Wednesday cleaning up graffiti in downtown Sacramento with Clark’s brother.

The governor on Friday also introduced Lateefah Simon, president of the Akonadi Foundation, who is a civil rights and racial justice advocate, and Ronald Davis, the former police chief of East Palo Alto who led President Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Newsom said the two will work with him on spearheading statewide policing and social justice reforms.

“It is our duty and we must move forward expeditiously,” Simon said, calling this an “inflection moment.”

“For those men and women for decades and literally centuries who have been calling and demanding a shift, we owe them,” she added. “The state will come first and so goes the nation.”