Flanked by civil rights advocates, California lawmakers announced new legislation Tuesday designed to make it easier to prosecute police officers who kill civilians.

“We have been deeply saddened and frustrated by the killing of black and brown men by law enforcement,” said Assemblywoman Shirley Weber (D-San Diego), the bill’s author. “It seems that the worst possible outcome is increasingly the only outcome that we experience.”

The bill follows the Sacramento shooting of Stephon Clark, an unarmed, 22-year-old black man who was killed in his grandmother’s backyard last month by police looking for a vandal in the neighborhood. Lawmakers described Clark’s killing, and other instances in which officers shot black and Latino residents, as the impetus behind the legislation.

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