Librarian
Member
The cops are neither lawyers, legislators, nor Department of Justice staff members. In LEO training they are given instructions regarding the law, outlining the circumstances when it is premissible to arrest a person (or not arrest a person). If the State issued faulty instructions, don't blame the cops.
Poor training is indeed not the fault of the street officers. The responsibility goes to administrative and political levels; Los Angeles has an 'attitude problem'.
DOJ may so advise, but other court cases in CA have made the point I did earlier - when the legislature shows it knows how to write a law for a particular result in one part of the Penal Code, and it does not write a different part in the same way, a court is quite likely to conclude that the intended results in the second part were not supposed to be the same as in the first part.As I read California gun law posted by Librarian above:
It seems that the qualifier 'directly' appears in certain sections of gun law in California, and the Department of Justice advises that it also applies to other sections. This may or may not be true, depending upon prior court cases and other tests of the law.
In this case, the court's reasoning is likely (IMHO) to go 'if directly in one part has a kind of result, NOT using directly in a different place has a different result, and since the code shows the legislature knows the difference, the difference was intentional'.
Of course, very little is certain when it comes to California courts.