Monterey County Crime & Justice Articles

KING CITY — King City Police Department recently welcomed the city’s newest officer, Javier Zavala, to the force. Officer Zavala, a Greenfield native and Navy veteran, was sworn in Aug. 8. Zavala graduated from Monterey Peninsula College Law Enforcement Academy …

More California police departments are deploying body cameras. A new court ruling restricts how prosecutors can use footage of witness accounts at trial.

The public now has its clearest picture yet of medical and mental health care conditions at Monterey County Jail after the release of previously sealed reports by neutral monitors charged with inspecting the state of the jail.

It’s a pleasant 67 degrees in Seaside as I write this, slightly warmer than the usual high of 65. Such moderate temperatures are so normal for Seaside that it’s easy, for those who haven’t traveled further inland this summer, to…

Carmel’s tab for the seven months its former police chief, Alan Ward, worked is a big one: It cost the city more than an estimated $364,200. That includes the cost of a nationwide search, Ward’s salary for the year he…

Almost half of the jobs for doctors and psychiatrists in California prisons are unfilled. Now, their union says it’s ready to strike over pay even as the state faces a steep budget deficit.

It's a potentially long and unclear road to creating an oversight board and/or inspector general's office with authority over the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, but the process is underway.

Sara Rubin here, thinking about what we still don’t know about conditions at Monterey County Jail. As you can read in a story by Rey Mashayekhi that will run in print in the July 27 issue of the Weekly, and…

Since settling a class-action lawsuit over poor conditions at Monterey County Jail in 2015, the county and Wellpath, its health care provider at the jail, have been required to allow court-appointed neutral monitors at the facility. Those monitors have written…

A yearlong investigation shows that a $100 million-a-year rehabilitation program for former California prisoners grew with little oversight from the state corrections agency. It's unclear how many parolees wind up back in prison.

A Bay Area woman sued her husband's employer after she became infected with COVID-19. The California Supreme Court found that giving her workers' comp could set a precedent that would imperil the system.

The first-in-the-nation state-appointed task force report contains hundreds of recommendations for reparation, including a proposal that the state apologize and make financial amends for slavery and decades of racist policies.

In a landmark case, California's Supreme Court will decide if cities must switch their at-large elections to a voting-by-district system after hearing oral arguments the Pico Neighborhood Association v. Santa Monica voting rights case June 27.

The population of transgender inmates in California prisoners surged by 234 percent in the years since the state adopted a first-in-the-nation policy allowing gender-affirming health care.

Learn about the charismatic leaders who founded Daughters of Bilitis, Mattachine Society, ONE Inc. and other “homophile movement” groups in the Golden State.

You have to be 18 to get divorced in California, but there’s no minimum age to get married. Child marriage survivors protested at the state Capitol, but the Legislature likely won’t act until next year.

Gov. Gavin Newsom took to his Twitter account to propose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would regulate gun sales and use nationwide, in a way that courts cannot change.

‘You small, pathetic man,’ Gavin Newsom wrote in a Twitter post suggesting he’d pursue criminal charges against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis over recent migrant flights to Sacramento.

California is unwinding the prison-building boom of the 1980s and 1990s. The cuts are falling on small towns that banked on government jobs to anchor their communities.

More than 4 percent of death penalty convicts have been wrongfully convicted, data shows. But courts including the U.S. Supreme Court have failed to provide protections for the innocent facing death at the hands of the state.