Home / Law / California statutes

California statutes

12 sections of the California Penal Code, chosen because they bear on policing — use of force, arrest, officer certification, complaints and personnel records. Each page reproduces the section as the California Legislature publishes it.

This is a scoped pilot. It is 12 sections of the Penal Code chosen for policing relevance, not a mirror of the code, and nothing here should be read as the full law on any subject. Four other states were investigated and have no stable, machine-readable source to reproduce from: Texas’s statute site serves a page of 250,874 bytes containing 1,364 characters of visible text, and law.resource.org returns HTTP 451 for state codes. The federal layer is at /law.

Read the labels carefully. California publishes no caption for an individual section. The line shown under each citation as “Location in the code” is the chapter or title the section sits under, taken from the Legislature’s own table of contents — it says where the section is filed, not what it says. The “Our reading” line is Police Census’s own summary of the text, not the Legislature’s wording.

Cal. Penal Code § 148Location in the code: CHAPTER 7. Other Offenses Against Public Justice [142. - 181.]Our reading: Among other provisions, the offence of willfully resisting, delaying or obstructing a public officer, peace officer or emergency medical technician in the discharge of a duty, and its penalty.Cal. Penal Code § 196Location in the code: CHAPTER 1. Homicide [187. - 199.]Our reading: Homicide is justifiable when committed by peace officers and those acting by their command, either in obedience to a court judgment or when the homicide results from a use of force that complies with Section 835a.Cal. Penal Code § 832.5Location in the code: CHAPTER 4.5. Peace Officers [830. - 832.18.]Our reading: Requires each department or agency that employs peace officers to establish a procedure to investigate complaints by members of the public against its personnel, make a written description of it available to the public, and retain complaints for set minimum periods.Cal. Penal Code § 832.7Location in the code: CHAPTER 4.5. Peace Officers [830. - 832.18.]Our reading: Subdivision (a) makes peace officer and custodial officer personnel records, and records kept under Section 832.5, confidential in criminal and civil proceedings except by discovery. Subdivision (b) lists records that are not confidential, such as records of an incident involving the discharge of a firearm at a person or a sustained finding of unreasonable or excessive force.Cal. Penal Code § 832.13Location in the code: CHAPTER 4.5. Peace Officers [830. - 832.18.]Our reading: Every person employed as a peace officer must immediately report all uses of force by the officer to the officer’s department or agency.Cal. Penal Code § 835aLocation in the code: CHAPTER 5. Arrest, by Whom and How Made [833. - 851.93.]Our reading: Legislative findings on the authority of peace officers to use physical force; when an officer may use objectively reasonable force to arrest, prevent escape or overcome resistance; and the conditions under which deadly force is justified.Cal. Penal Code § 836Location in the code: CHAPTER 5. Arrest, by Whom and How Made [833. - 851.93.]Our reading: When a peace officer may arrest a person with a warrant, and without one; and arrest provisions for domestic violence calls and protective-order violations.Cal. Penal Code § 13510.8Location in the code: ARTICLE 2. Field Services, Standards, and Certification [13510. - 13519.15.]Our reading: The Commission’s duty and power to revoke, suspend or cancel the certification of a peace officer, including for serious misconduct and for fraud or misrepresentation in the application.Cal. Penal Code § 13510.85Location in the code: ARTICLE 2. Field Services, Standards, and Certification [13510. - 13519.15.]Our reading: What happens when the division finds reasonable grounds to deny, revoke or suspend a peace officer’s certification: written notice and reasons, an explanation of the decertification procedure, and a request for review within 30 days.Cal. Penal Code § 13519.4Location in the code: ARTICLE 2. Field Services, Standards, and Certification [13510. - 13519.15.]Our reading: Requires the Commission to develop guidelines and training on racial and cultural differences, and on racial or identity profiling, and includes legislative findings on and a definition of racial or identity profiling.Cal. Penal Code § 13519.10Location in the code: ARTICLE 2. Field Services, Standards, and Certification [13510. - 13519.15.]Our reading: Requires the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to implement use-of-force training courses and to develop uniform minimum guidelines on use of force, which agencies may use in creating the use of force policy that Government Code Section 7286 requires them to adopt.Cal. Penal Code § 13652Location in the code: TITLE 4.7. Law Enforcement Agency Regulations [13650. - 13670.]Our reading: Restricts the use of kinetic energy projectiles and chemical agents (rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray and similar) to disperse an assembly, protest or demonstration, and sets the conditions for deploying them. It is about those munitions at crowd events, not a general use-of-force policy; the use-of-force training section is Section 13519.10.