The trouble with covering California is that there is so much crazy coming from Sacramento, it is like one of our dams.
There are hundreds of potential items of poor policy and ridiculous rule-making leaking from the state capital that is flooded with unintended consequences and richly deserved mockery.
Take, for example, what happened last October when California created the “Ebony Alert” system, an analog of the AMBER Alert system used to locate missing children, on Sunday. The system prioritizes recovering missing black children who do not qualify for an AMBER Alert. As we noted at the time:
“The AMBER Alert system must fulfill strict criteria for the message to be broadcast,” according to the enacting legislation’s factual findings. “If these criteria are not met, an AMBER Alert cannot be issued, and the child is labeled as a runaway.”Missing children classified as “runaways” are not eligible for an AMBER Alert.
In other words, some children are getting prioritized based solely on their race. Attention to this new law came last week when the California Highway Patrol issued an “Ebony Alert” that has received 35 million X-views.
Now there is increasing scrutiny on the implementation of the law. Attorney Aaron Walker took a look at the state law and asserts that it is unconstitutional.
…[B]luntly, no law enforcement agency has to do any of this, and we think they should refuse to do it because it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. There is nothing in the Amber Alert system that excludes black people, even if they also qualify for Ebony Alerts, so they should stick to the Amber Alert system.But more insidiously, all those factors mentioned in the Ebony Alert laws like disability status, age and so on are optional, too (‘The law enforcement agency may consider the following factors’). The only criteria that must be present is 1) that the law enforcement agency determines that would be an effective tool the in the investigation and 2) that the person be a black youth—whatever that means.Further, as the title to this article promised, they don’t just have an Ebony Alert for young black people who are missing. Nope, they also have one for Native Americans in Cal. Gov. Code § 8594.13. And it uses a heck of a term: Feather Alert.No, we are not making this up. We wish we were, but we aren’t.
The race-based rule is receiving a fair amount of mocking on social media.
Some offered a few interesting alternatives for other races and ethnic groups…in the interest of entertainment and “fairness”
California…where we drown under atmospheric rivers of ludicrous race-based legislation.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY