On the same day a female Los Angeles Police officer was sentenced to 36 months for delivering hard kicks to the groin of a handcuffed woman who later died, a homeless woman with mental illness was facing 25 years to life for merely picking up a police baton. How do we account for this disparity? How do we reconcile local prosecutors giving police officers the benefit of every real or imagined mitigating circumstance while civilians are routinely overcharged with crimes carrying the most severe penalties?

The woman with mental illness was at the scene of a fatal police shooting March 1 on Los Angeles' Skid Row when a bystander's video recorded her picking up the baton an officer had dropped shortly before the fatal shooting. She held the baton in the air but never advanced on any officers or threatened them with it. She could well have been adrift in a psychosis, not fully realizing what was taking place in front of her eyes. In any event, for picking up that baton, she was facing a 25-years-to-life sentence under California's Three Strikes Law.

Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey has announced a plan to keep mentally ill people out of jail by getting them treatment, and she has directed her staff to review the charges against this woman. We can only wait to see what, if anything, that review will change. But we already know that the charge she still faces is outrageously excessive.

Police departments have adopted a zero tolerance, broken windows approach to combating crime. The theory is that preventing small or low-level crimes such as vandalism creates an atmosphere of order and vigilance that discourages more serious crimes. The theory and its benefits certainly have been questioned.

But what's clear is the broken windows has never been brought to policing itself. As video proliferates, often disputing officers' accounts of incidents, there is a growing sense of a police culture that is out of control and that has escaped meaningful scrutiny. If preventing low-level offenses sends the message that more serious offenses will not be tolerated, what's the message when officers are virtually never charged let alone convicted for their misconduct?

We need look no farther than the case of Gabriel Carrillo who was handcuffed and beaten to a pulp when he went to visit his brother in Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail. County prosecutors charged Carrillo with assaulting the deputies who had lied about the beating. He faced prison time had he been convicted, but a photograph of his bruised wrists convinced prosecutors that he had been handcuffed while being beaten. They dropped those charges on the eve of trial.

But it took federal -- not local -- prosecutors to get justice for Carrillo. Two deputies and a sergeant were charged with using unreasonable force and falsifying records, and two of them were charged with violating Carrillo's civil rights. A federal court jury looked at those same photos of Carrillo's wrists, concluded the deputies were lying and needed only four hours to convict all three.

In that case, photos tipped the balance against the deputies. Now video footage promises to be a game changer. Video from cell phones, police dash cameras and body cameras has become an important tool for assessing the truthfulness of officers' reports, especially when their actions result in injury or death. That footage crucially also gives the public a look at what prosecutors saw before giving officers a pass.

A fatal police shooting in Gardena is a graphic, tragic example. City officials fought tooth and nail against releasing the video and agreed to pay a $4.7 million settlement with the understanding that the footage would be kept from the public. But a federal judge released it. And what a story it had to tell.

The video shows Gardena Police officers shooting an unarmed man who posed no visible threat. And it raises questions, serious questions--not just about the officers' actions, but about the district attorney's office so emphatically finding the shooting justified.

The images have the look of a cold-blooded execution. And the prosecutors' exoneration has all the elements of farce.

In the past year, there have been 585 police shootings, but only four officers have been charged. In all four cases there was video, whether from body or dash cams or civilian witnesses. To be sure, video does not ensure that there will be charges whenever there is misconduct. But even when prosecutors fail to bring charges, their decisions can be subjected to better scrutiny with the help of video.

Ultimately, we must wonder about the system we've set up, the incentives it creates, and the messages it sends when the "punishment" that is meted out against wrongdoers is in the form of civil damages awards that are paid for not by the officers but by their departments and in the end taxpayers.

Hector Villagra is executive director of the ACLU of Southern California.

Earlier this month, a federal judge released disturbing video of Gardena Police officers shooting an unarmed man to death and wounding another — footage the city and its police department fought to keep from the public. That fight shows why we can’t leave it to police departments’ discretion whether to be transparent on deadly force, but badly need state law to make information like this available to the public.

Without the video, the public had only conflicting descriptions of the shooting. The men who survived the shooting described holding their hands in the air when police fired. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office found the killing justified, describing how the fatally wounded man failed to comply with officers’ shouted orders to keep his hands up, and concluded “the officers responded with deadly force in reasonable fear for their lives.”

With such conflicting accounts, people default to assumptions based on instincts and ideology. Many trust the government because they’re inclined to. Others, who may have seen police misconduct glossed over in the past, believe that’s happening again.

The video changes that. It shows the shooting of an unarmed man who posed no visible threat. And even as it answers questions about the shooting, it raises more about standards for use of force and our institutions for holding police accountable — why has Gardena not imposed discipline? How could the DA so forcefully find the shooting justified?

A fundamental obstacle to improving policing in California is the secrecy around police use of force and misconduct. There is no transparency when the agency under scrutiny keeps critical evidence secret. When one side controls the information, there can be no assurance of accountability and as a result no public trust.

Sadly, police agencies in California have institutionalized secrecy, especially when it comes to examining encounters that lead to a civilian’s injury or death.
The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, has refused to release video from body cameras worn by officers involved in the fatal shooting of a homeless man killed on the city’s downtown streets.

Officials in Gardena openly admitted in court filings that the city paid $4.7 million to settle the case, in part, with the expectation that the video would remain hidden from the public — in essence, using taxpayer funds as hush money. But it wasn’t just Gardena that wanted to keep the video secret. The Los Angeles County Police Chief’s Association, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, California Police Chiefs’ Association and the California Peace Officers’ Association all filed legal briefs urging the court to keep the video from public view.

Why?

Because law enforcement feels entitled to limit public scrutiny. In that view, an officer who kills someone has a privacy interest in the investigation that trumps public discussion. And police agencies feel they should be able to keep investigative materials from the public so they can’t second guess the agency’s decisions about in-policy shootings or discipline — as would have happened here, if the press hadn’t intervened to obtain release of the video.

That has to change. High-profile police killings over the past year show us that the standards for police use of deadly force are out of step with public expectations, and the systems to review that force are broken. But those systems remain broken because they’re kept secret.

We must open policing to public scrutiny. That means releasing videos from dash cams and body cams, and allowing the public to see the investigation of serious incidents so they can understand if the rules for use of force are appropriate and the systems for accountability are working.

Police must be accountable to the public because even when they kill, they act in our name.

Hector Villagra is executive director and Peter Bibring is director, police practices at the ACLU of Southern California.

By Anna Bauer

Reyna Frias worries about her kids. One of her sons is in special education, and both of her sons are English learners and low income students. Like many other parents with children enrolled in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) schools, she wants to ensure that her children are receiving the best possible education, particularly when they face significant challenges and need additional services to keep up with their classmates.

So when Ms. Frias heard that state lawmakers enacted the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), a new law that provides more funding to California school districts that serve high-need students, she hoped it would bring much needed relief to her school and two children. She grew even more encouraged when she learned that the law is intended to increase and improve services for English learners, students in foster care and low income students.

But nearly two years since Governor Jerry Brown signed the law into effect, Ms. Frias has seen little improvement in the services being provided to her children and is growing frustrated. “My youngest child needs help learning English, but he isn’t really getting the help he needs. As a mother, I feel frustrated to see my son . . . ,” said Ms. Frias, her voice trailing off.

Enacted in July, 2013, LCFF was meant to reapportion California’s education funds to high need students, who include Ms. Frias’s two children and make up 84 percent of LAUSD’s enrollment.

Unfortunately, many students, including Ms. Frias’ 8-year-old, are not receiving the help he needs because LAUSD manipulated a budget calculation to reduce its obligation to add new or better services for high-need students, including English-learners, over time.

LAUSD counted nearly a half billion dollars in pre-LCFF spending on special education services as part of its baseline estimate of services it was providing to high-need students. By inflating its starting point, LAUSD reduced its obligation to increase or improve services for high-need students in the future. LAUSD’s approach is illegal because LCFF is designed to increase or improve services for high-need students in proportion to the amount of new funds those students generate. Before LCFF, LAUSD was already required by federal and state law to provide special education services to all eligible students. And eligibility for special education has nothing to do with being a member of one of the three high-need student groups under LCFF.

So LAUSD is taking credit for something it already had to do. The manipulation deprived high need students of $126 million for improved services funding for the 2014-15 school year and $288 million for the upcoming school year. At this rate, LAUSD will take more than $2 billion from high need students like Ms. Frias’s two children by 2021.

The ACLU Foundation of Southern California (ACLU SoCal), along with Public Advocates and Covington & Burling LLP, sued LAUSD on behalf Ms. Frias and the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles for violating this state law.

The suit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, asks that the school district be required to invest the appropriate amount of money to develop new or improved services for the high need students targeted under LCFF.

Ms. Frias and other LAUSD parents feel “it is unfair that the state says it is going to provide some help and then the district doesn’t provide it.” She hopes that LAUSD will recalculate their expenditures and rewrite their LCAP so her sons, and the hundreds of thousands of other high need students in Los Angeles, will finally receive the proper amount of supplemental services they have been promised by the new law.

Anna Bauer is an intern with the ACLU of Southern California