California IS a sanctuary state......
This is only slowly beginning to change now that more police behavior is recorded on video and the public (and the politicians who control the government bureaucracies and who rely on support of said public) is less able to turn a blind eye to police and government misconduct.
Things are generally trending in a good direction when it comes to tolerance of misconduct by police and in government in general. Give it a decade or two.
And which are which? I'm assuming you consider California big-government based on your comment, and as a Californian I'm inclined to agree. But it seems Alaska leads in "State FTE's per 10K pop"[0] and Texas and Florida both have large absolute numbers of state employees according to that source.
Intuitively, and subject to my own prejudice, I would guess those states that have vocal majorities against activist government also tend to let the cops get away with all kinds of things, from aggressive civil forfeiture to assault and murder; and that states like California perhaps counterintuitively do so as well, maybe (or maybe not) to a lesser extent.
[0]: http://www.governing.com/gov-data/public-workforce-salaries/...
[Edit: typo]
NH takes civil liberties very seriously. Maine takes having high quality government very seriously. Granted both those statements are becoming less true every year as a particular southern neighbor sheds some population in a northern direction.
Police conduct that would get 30sec on the evening news and a "well shucks, that's the government, what can ya do" response in MA or NY would almost certainly result in heads rolling and many letters to the editor involving the words "tar" and "feathers" in northern New England.
It's about culture as more than it is which particular party is in charge in any given state. The people of the small government states in my experience tend to get more riled up when representatives of government do bad things and politicians respond to that.
Texas is more commonly presented as an example of small government. They're still on the lower half of that employee list and have relatively low taxes, but the government aggressively gets in the way of consenting adults doing things. It's still illegal to gamble in Texas (excepting the state-run numbers racket, because objections mysteriously vanish when the government does it), or to buy alcohol or cars on Sunday, and the only state that has more restrictive gun laws without discretionary-issue of CCW permits is Nevada. Texas did repeal their certificate-of-need law for health care providers, so they're definitely doing something right, but government is not an exception to everything being bigger there.
Assuming that FTE/population chart is what it says and doesn't include contractors, I'm not even sure it has any use whatsoever. And that's not getting into all the things where some government would clearly be useful—for instance, getting internet speeds off the list of things that aren't bigger in Texas.