Those who physically attack doctors, nurses and other emergency department workers in California face harsher penalties in 2025 thanks to a new law.
In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 977, which increased penalties from six months to a year in jail for those convicted of assaulting California’s hospital emergency room workers.
The bill’s author was Assemblymember Freddie Rodriguez, who spent 30 years as an emergency medical technician in the San Gabriel Valley.
Rodriguez, a Democrat whose term ended in 2024, said he was compelled to introduce the legislation after seeing too many of his friends and former colleagues attacked on the job. He felt that there needed to be tougher penalties to discourage future attacks.
As he made his case to lawmakers this year, he testified that his daughter, Desirae, a respiratory technician, was recently assaulted on the job. Other health care workers testified that they too had been attacked.
Recent polling shows they’re hardly alone. A poll from the American College of Emergency Physicians found that more than 90% of ER doctors said they’d been attacked within the last year.
Though the bill ended up passing overwhelmingly, some progressive Democrats either voted against or didn’t vote for the proposal which counts the same as a “no” vote. They, along with prison reform advocates and the California Public Defenders Association, argued that increasing penalties doesn’t deter crime and that many of those assaulting ER workers are mentally ill. They noted that laws on the books already prohibited assault.
Former Gov. Jerry Brown, who faced a U.S. Supreme Court order to shrink the state’s prison population, had vetoed an identical bill from Rodriguez in 2015.
The California Medical Association, the lobbying group for California’s physicians, was glad Newsom didn’t do the same.
“Thank you Governor Newsom, Assemblymember Rodriguez, and the Legislature for having the backs of health care workers across the state,” the association’s president, Dr. Tanya Spirtos, said in a statement after Newsom signed the bill.
Ryan Sabalow is a reporter with CalMatters.
Wait! This is very serious and needs investigation as to the underlying root causes! ER and medical staff are in GREAT DANGER! BUT, slapping penalties after the fact, will NOT prevent these incidents!!! Something IS causing this increase! Measurably a significant change occurred!
REALITY: these are not premeditated violent attacks on the public!
So the only way to prevent these attacks on ER and hospital staff, is to honestly look at the causes!
1. When a person being arrested and detained needs emergency medical care… are the protocols sufficient to keep the staff safe? What changed?
2. What needs to change in the intake evaluation, to assess if the patient possess a threat or risk to attending staff? What changed?
3. Have the treatment protocols changed in some way that solicites a violent reaction from patients??? Why these changes? Change it back to a previously more successful methodology.
4. Have the medication drugs changed? Why are patients being given drugs that are known to cause a violent reactions and disassociation? What alternative drugs could be used instead?
5. Are the decision makers for the policies increasing administration of drugs that measurably cause violent reactions and disassociation, totally removed from the patient floor? Meaning the supervising MDs making these newer prescription drug decisions, do not personally even work with patients, nor work in the physical rooms with staff and patients?
6. Do the ER and medical staff who directly work with the patients, have autonomy and decision making authority?
7. Has the changes to the drugs administered to patients causing increased violent behaviors, and disassociation, been reviewed by independent ethics boards, who have zero connection to profits and financial decisions?
8. Has the changes to the palliative care staff’s authority now being superior and over ER’s authority, been evaluated based on measurable results? Including patients ER staff diagnosed as “absolutely going to make it, no risk of death” being overriden by palliative care staff assessments of the exact same patient at the same time being instead, “their body is shutting down and they are dying, so we will switch them to rapidly assisted euthanasia?
This is a VERY SERIOUS topic!!!
These laws are horrible and unrelated response!
There’s a measurable statistic on increased violent attacks in hospitals.
Among other causes, if you examine the drug administration changes, there’s an obvious culprit!
There’s been a HUGE change to the drugs automatically administered to nearly all patients!
The majority of patients are automatically given drugs to “calm them down”…
Yet these drug cocktails are CAUSING otherwise calm cooperative patients, to experience severe disassociation, and then violently attack the hospital staff!!!
Imagine you fall of a ladder or are in a car crash, but wake up in a hellish realm of demons stabbing you and cutting you…
You’re going to fight to the death…
Well, that’s the type of drugged out hallucinations nearly every patient is being subjected to! The majority have no idea they are even in a hospital!!!
Drug people into a torturous nightmare… They will react violently!
Watch the documentaries made on these “calming down” drugs!
Character confirmed sweet little elderly grandmas on security footage, jumped out of the shadows, and beat the random nurse to death with a tray. Confirmed zero history of aggression. Totally drugged into disassociation and violence.
Yes there are drugs that have been thoroughly researched and do produce these responses.
So why are these exact drugs now the standard protocol, automatically given to nearly every patient!?!
DO NOT IGNORE THIS POST. LOOK INTO THE RESEARCH YOURSELF.
I fail to see how a legal penalty will stop a patient who is likely under some sort of drug or is mentally ill from attacking staff. There’s a bigger root issue that this bill does not address at all! Very very unsettling and bad bill.