The California Legislature is considering effectively restoring internet privacy regulations in America’s largest state that were adopted for the entire nation under the Obama administration but were repealed in April.

The measure by Assemblyman Ed Chau – Assembly Bill 375  – is meant to counter President Trump’s signing of a resolution passed by congressional Republicans allowing internet service providers to sell most of the information they have on customers’ browsing habits. Chau, a Monterey Park Democrat, would only allow such information to be sold after ISP customers “opt in.”

Large telecommunications firms like AT&T, Comcast, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon argue that it’s unfair that Google and Facebook are allowed to capitalize on the browsing histories of their users with targeted ads if the telecom firms don’t have the same rights. Chau joins privacy and consumer advocates in contending it’s wrong to equate how Google and Facebook pay the bills while offering popular free applications with internet service providers which generate tens of billions of dollars in monthly fees from their customers – companies which for years have been among the least popular businesses in the United States.

AB375 would also forbid ISPs from offering lower rates in return for being able to use browsing histories for marketing purposes and would mandate that ISP contracts be written in clear, plain language.

Chau gutted and amended the bill last month. In its original version, it was an uncontroversial measure related to video game arcades that won unanimous Assembly approval in May without a negative vote.

At the news conference unveiling the revised bill, it won the strong support of Richard Holober, executive director of the Consumer Federation of California: “It’s based on a simple demand of the people: Ask me first before you use or share my personal information,” he said, according to a Bay Area News Group report. Representatives of the ACLU and other civil liberties groups also praised the measure.

California hailed for privacy protections in 2015

But while the Bay Area News Group report cast Chau’s bill as reflecting California lawmakers hopes to be a key part of the “Resistance” movement opposing the Trump White House, it’s actually in keeping with the Golden State’s history. In 2015, Wired magazine wrote that California “now has the nation’s best digital privacy laws.”

Chau’s bill could prove popular with the public. In the wake of a series of hacking scandals, internet privacy appears to be an increasingly important priority for Americans. This was borne out by a Consumer Reports survey of 1,007 adults in April that found a steady erosion of confidence in government’s ability to protect their data privacy. Some 65 percent had no faith the government was up to the job – and 92 percent said their browsing histories should only be sold after they “opt in.”

The Los Angeles Times reported that California was the 20th state to consider adopting laws responding to the repeal of the Obama internet privacy rules. The article downplayed fears that this was an area where state law would be superseded by federal law because “communications law has traditionally allowed a division of responsibilities between the state and federal government,” according to a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District passed a $7.5 billion 2017-18 budget this week on a 5-1 vote with Superintendent Michelle King

But despite the upbeat rhetoric, a crisis is looming in the nation’s second-largest school district as enrollment falls from a projected 514,000 in 2017 to 480,000 in 2020. Since the state’s main education funding formula is based on average daily attendance, this could force mass layoffs of teachers or even drastic measures like shortening the school year. A $422 million deficit is anticipated in 2019-20, with red ink after that for as far as the eye can see.

None of this comes as any surprise. A blue-ribbon commission’s report issued in November 2015 said L.A. Unified was facing fiscal disaster because of the enrollment declines, which are primarily due to falling birth rates, and because of the cost of pensions and retiree health care benefits. Employee retirement benefits will claim 8 percent of the school budget in 2017-18 and more than double that sum in coming years as the state’s 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System ratchets up required payments from districts and as more of the district’s aging workforce retires.

These costs are the primary reason that while the 2017-18 LAUSD budget is nearly 7 percent larger than for the just-concluded school year, the plan still only penciled out after 121 layoffs or “separations,” mostly for holders of clerical positions. About 180 employees will be reassigned, many to part-time duties.

Blue-ribbon panel warned of disaster in 2015

Since the grim 2015 report was issued, three developments have cast L.A. Unified’s finances in an even harsher light.

The most significant is charter school advocates backed by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and other wealthy reformers taking over the LAUSD school board in a May election, defeating teachers union-backed candidates who have generally controlled the board in recent times. Broad wants half or more of Los Angeles students in charters, double the current amount. While reformers have a case that this would be better for students, it would sharply reduce state funding under control of district officials and thus make it harder to forge any comprehensive response to the coming budget crisis.

The second development is a legal challenge mounted by civil rights groups that alleges the district has misspent vast amounts of state funds that were supposed to go specifically to help English-language learners, impoverished students and students in foster homes.

Filed in July 2015, the claim initially seemed unlikely to succeed. The previous month, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson had overruled a subordinate and held that Local Control Funding Formula dollars could be used for teacher raises – suggesting the restrictions on how the funds could be spent weren’t as strong as reformers believed.

But in May 2016, the Department of Education that Torlakson oversees held that L.A. Unified had improperly diverted $450 million in Local Control dollars.

The third development is the election of Donald Trump as president. Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, federal funding for education programs in all 50 states seems likely to significantly decrease. Federal dollars covered 9 percent of California’s education spending in 2016-17.

De Leon panel-packing scheme died handily

Good morning. TGIF and TG for the three-day weekend.

Everyone is looking back at the recently wrapped legislative session. And while Democrats will walk away from it with a long list of environmental accomplishments, one got away.

A bill sponsored by Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, would have added three members to the South Coast Air Quality Management Board, which regulates air quality in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties.

And while that probably seems as dull as watching paint dry to nearly everyone who just read it, the measure had major implications for Republicans, local governments, business interests, environmentalists and residents of the broad district that has some of the most toxic air in the nation.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• On the heels of a Los Angeles Times story saying she was making a play for voters on the right, Democratic Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez pushed Gov. Jerry Brown to sign a bill increasing minimum penalties in sexual assault cases, according to CalWatchdog.
• “More than 250 of California’s 1,228 charter schools, including dozens in Southern California, violate state law by keeping out low-performing students and creating unfair admission policies, according to the American Civil Liberties Union,” reports The San Bernardino County Sun.
• “A major effort to overhaul the state’s energy regulator surprisingly collapsed after late legislative maneuverings led to the unraveling of the broad coalition that had pushed for changes at the scandal-ridden agency,” writes the Los Angeles Times.   
• Democrats in Sacramento pushed through the broadest liberal agenda in recent memory. The Sacramento Bee has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone ’til December. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mfleming

New follower: @TonyQuestUSA

But as the number of state charter schools has more than doubled — to 1,228 — over the past decade, grumbling has been building from traditional schools. This summer, that grumbling has translated into efforts to sharply increase regulation of charters.

Charter school advocates see this as a barely disguised effort to stop their movement in its tracks. The lack of strong regulations is behind the popularity of charters, they believe, allowing schools to focus on what works in classrooms as opposed to what the education establishment thinks is best.

Education establishment has long list of gripes

But defenders of traditional education say charters’ huge growth could never have occurred if there was an establishment conspiracy to subvert them. And they also cite several specific areas where they say their concerns about charters are specific and well-documented.

At a recent Senate Education Committee hearing, school officials — most notably Dina Wilson, director of the charter school office of the Los Angeles County Office of Education — offered a long list of complaints. The most prominent:

• Charter schools aren’t required to provide detailed financial information or to create comprehensive budget and facilities plans.
• Charter schools don’t have to follow laws requiring other schools to serve lunch, including subsidized meals for students from poor families.
• Charter schools have far more leeway in disciplining and expelling students, operating without the appeals process that regular schools must follow.
• Many charter schools don’t have high percentages of students from impoverished families who are often more costly to educate.

Charter advocates countered by saying the flexibility and freedom that they were criticized for having were not a problem with the hundreds of thousands of families eager to enroll their children. Advocates saw political motives — i.e., the animus of politically influential teachers unions — as being behind troubles some charters were having with authorities. 

The most specific accusation of charter mistreatment came from the CEO of Thrive Public Schools, a San Diego charter school organization. Nicole Assisi said despite having a track record of success and a strong planning document, first San Diego Unified and then the San Diego County Office of Education turned down Thrive’s request for a new charter. The reception was different from the State Board of Education, Assisi said. It unanimously approved the new charter, overruling the local decision-makers.

ACLU criticizes charters over admissions

But charter schools also face criticism from outside the education establishment. The ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the public interest law firm Public Advocates released a report on Aug. 1 that said about one-fifth of California charters were violating the law that they must be open to all students by having enrollment requirements — mostly involving academics — that public schools cannot impose.

The California Charter School Association responded by issuing a statement acknowledging problems that needed to be resolved. “We agree with the ACLU and Public Advocates that charter schools must be open to any student interested in attending, and no student or group of students should be excluded or discriminated against as a result of enrollment and admissions policies at any public school, including charter public schools,” wrote Jed Wallace, president and CEO of the charter association.

Wallace disagreed with the argument “that all essays, interviews and requests for student documentation for enrollment are per se discriminatory or exclusionary.” But he also wrote that all charter schools should review their policies to ensure “there is not even a perception of bias or discrimination in admissions and enrollment processes.”

But now a Bay Area judge has issued a ruling rebuking the city of Hayward and its police department for this practice. The case stemmed from the National Lawyers Guild’s request for footage from officers’ body cameras as they helped patrol a contentious overnight Black Live Matters protest in Berkeley on Dec. 6-7, 2014 — a request police complied with after the guild paid $3,247. Police justified the high cost by saying the footage had to be carefully examined and redacted.

That led to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Northern California and the Law Offices of Amitai Schwartz that culminated recently with a terse decision by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Evilio Grillo.

“The CPRA [California Public Records Act] and the related provisions in the California Constitution demonstrate a strong policy that the public should have prompt and low-cost access to public records,” Grillo wrote. Hayward and its police agency erred in its fee request by not only billing the guild for the direct costs associated with duplicating records but costs of “ancillary tasks necessarily associated with the retrieval, inspection and handling of the file from which the copy is extracted.”

Grillo’s ruling was called precedent-setting by the ACLU. It parallels a Milwaukee police case in which the Wisconsin Supreme Court ordered the city police agency to stop charging for redaction in public records requests.

Grillo ordered the Hayward police department to refund all but $1 of the $3,247 bill, with the $1 covering the cost of the DVD onto which the body camera footage was copied.

In November, the National Lawyers Guild sued the city of Berkeley on behalf of 11 plaintiffs over the conduct of its police force and the neighboring agencies which helped respond to the large protest. The suit alleges indiscriminate use of tear gas, rubber bullets and batons against protesters who were responding to the clearing of a white New York police officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who was caught on video telling police “I can’t breathe” before dying.

Berkeley police officials have already formally acknowledged doing a poor job during the protest. In June 2015, the department submitted a report to Berkeley’s Police Review Commission with 32 recommendations, “including improving the officers’ awareness of developing situations, making deployment of police resources more efficient and increasing the quality of equipment for communication with protesters,” the Daily Californian reported.

Good morning!

The ACLU of Northern California and other groups are pressuring Solano County Superior Court to stop suspending the driver licenses of people who can’t afford to pay fines for infractions.

The ACLU and others would prefer the suspension of licenses stop altogether, but argue courts should at least determine if the driver has an ability to pay prior to any suspension.

Flashback: The groups pressured San Mateo County Superior Court last month. At that time, CalWatchdog asked ACLU staff the obvious question: Didn’t these drivers get themselves in this mess by getting cited in the first place?

“We can hold people accountable without also ruining their lives,” said Micaela Davis, staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California, noting that losing the ability to drive limits the ability to work.

Calwatchdog has more.

In other news:

• It’s 4/20 — the unofficial day to smoke pot (or so we’ve read). The new pot czar of California, Lori Ajax, told The Orange County Register that marijuana businesses may soon rival booze businesses in California. That will certainly be a lot easier if recreation use becomes legal, and according to the LA Weekly, a ballot initiative to do just that is close to qualifying.

• After a big win in his home state of New York on Tuesday, business tycoon Donald Trump is surging in California. CalWatchdog has more.

• Five gun control measures advanced in the legislature on Tuesday, “including measures that would outlaw assault rifles with detachable magazines, ban possession of clips holding more than 10 rounds and require homemade guns to be registered with the state,” reports the Los Angeles Times.

• A new report on air quality suggests that 80 percent of Californians live in counties with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution at some time during the year. However, many places like Los Angeles (which has the highest level of ozone pollution in the country), El Centro and Sacramento are improving. And Salinas is one of the few cities in the country reporting no days of unhealthy air quality. SF Gate/AP has more. And here’s the full report.

Tidbits:

• Since October, 1,900 pregnant Californians have been kicked out of their exchange-bought health insurance plans and placed in Medi-Cal without any notice, reports Voice of OC.

• Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, has repaid questionable payments made from his campaign account (like $361 to a surf and skate shop, $1,200 to a garage door company and $2,023 in cash payments to his wife and campaign manager), reports The San Diego Union-Tribune.

• And a bill to put the twin tunnels water project before voters is advancing in the legislature, reports The Sacramento Bee.

Assembly:

• Full slate of hearings.

Senate:

• Full slate of hearings.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com
Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp
New followers: @patmaymerc @FlashReport

Current California law already bars the practice of seizing property without a conviction for assets valued at under $25,000 and requires “clear and convincing evidence” of a connection to a crime for assets exceeding $25,000 in value.

Law enforcement can get around that if the seizure is done in coordination with federal law enforcement and 20 percent of the proceeds are kicked up to the federal government — yet often there’s not even an arrest because federal law doesn’t require it. Instead there’s just a suspicion that the property, not necessarily the person, is attached to some criminal activity.

People often get their property back, but after considerable time and hassle. Or sometimes they don’t. So the bill, sponsored by Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, and Asm. David Hadley, R-Torrance, would close that loophole and require a conviction for seizure of assets of any amount. Proponents like Mitchell and others say the practice often violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

“Our country and our state’s constitutions aim to protect the citizenry and this is a classic example of that,” Mitchell told CalWatchdog in an interview. “If folks love to promote the right to bear arms, I say we have the right to our own private property not being seized by law enforcement, (especially) when not even being charged with a crime.”

How it works

The program was designed to seize the assets of large criminal enterprises, toppling them in the process. But as budgets were cut, law enforcement saw it as a viable revenue stream, and the claims of abuse started piling up.

Some of the more egregious examples have been the attempted seizure of a $1.5 million building in Anaheim because the landlord rented space to a medical marijuana dispensary (which was legal in CA), and the story of Bob Alexander, who had $10,788 in cash that he was about to use to purchase a car for his daughter before the money was seized in Mendocino County because he had medical marijuana on him (along with the doctor’s recommendation for the marijuana, which was shown to police).

Alexander did get his money back eight months later. No charges were ever filed.

Opponents of the bill argue that law enforcement doesn’t police for profit, and asset seizure is a vital tool used to cripple criminal organizations, partially by funding costly investigations. The California District Attorneys Association claimed the bill would “deny every law enforcement agency in California direct receipt of any forfeited assets.”

“California’s asset forfeiture law will be changed for the worse, and it will cripple the ability of law enforcement to forfeit assets from drug dealers when arrest and incarceration is an incomplete strategy for combatting drug trafficking,” Sean Hoffman, CDAA’s director of legislation argued in a letter.

“Narcotics investigations are costly, and the California asset forfeiture law’s dedication of forfeiture proceeds to the seizing law enforcement agencies speaks to the serious resource needs involved when drug traffickers and their ill-gotten gains are pursued,” Hoffman added.

Revenue from the equitable sharing program exploded over the last decade as local agencies in California became more aware of the loophole and budgets were threatened as part of the recession. From 2002 to 2013, revenue from federal forfeitures (the ones that don’t need a conviction) tripled while revenue from state forfeitures (which often do require a conviction) stagnated, according to a study by the Drug Policy Alliance.

And it pays. The LAPD was able to purchase a $5 million helicopter with funds from its equitable sharing account.

There is also a difference between civil asset forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. According to the Department of Justice, criminal forfeiture comes as part of a criminal prosecution of a defendant. Yet in civil forfeiture cases, “the property is the defendant and no criminal charge against the owner is necessary.”

While this doesn’t easily explain how property can commit a crime, it does explain why there are cases have names like U.S. v. $4,000 and U.S. v. White Cadillac, as reported by NPR.

Building momentum

On Monday, Mitchell will join Alexander, the American Civil Liberties Union and a local Black Lives Matter chapter outside the Capitol building to push for the bill along with another, which would make public the details of investigations into use of force incidents and confirmed cases of misconduct by police.

The bill died on the Assembly floor last year under massive pressure from law enforcement groups, but is eligible for reconsideration, so supporters are building momentum. The bill already passed the Senate, and it’s unclear where Gov. Jerry Brown stands on the issue.

The bill is supported by groups on both sides of the political aisle — Mitchell and Hadley penned an op-ed last year. In fact, Grover Norquist, president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, came out in support of the bill last week, giving additional cover to Republicans.

“In America, the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are supposed to protect our due process and property rights, civil asset forfeiture in its current form undermines these principles,” Norquist said in his statement. “This status quo in the Golden State is unacceptable.”

Late last year, momentum for the bill dissipated as the DOJ put on hold the equitable sharing program. But just last week, the DOJ was “pleased” to announce the program was back on.

Mitchell told CalWatchdog that she’s not against the program in general, just when it’s used to take property without giving due process to the owner. She said many of the reports she’s read about and heard about from voters scared her into thinking about how her and her mother could have run into similar problems on one of their many trips back from Vegas, where her mother would win jackpots playing slots.

“When I thought about it and began to hear the stories I realized that I could have been a victim,” Mitchell said. “The kinds of scenarios are so commonplace.”

She applauded state lawmakers who years ago added the conviction requirement, but said it’s time to take it one step further.

“California legislators stepped up years ago to change law, but it’s this loophole that continues to cause problems for Califorina residents,” Mitchell said.

With a widespread shortage of execution drugs used in the now-familiar “cocktails,” officials have now aimed to “let corrections officials choose from four types of powerful barbiturates to execute prisoners,” according to KCRA Sacramento. “A choice would be made for each execution, depending on which drug is available. The single drug would replace the series of three drugs that were last used in 2006, when 76-year-old Clarence Ray Allen was executed for ordering a triple murder.”

“The plan to use barbiturates to execute inmates sentenced to die in the most populous U.S. state drew fire from religious activists, who called capital punishment grisly and anti-democratic at a hearing in Sacramento,” Reuters reported. “Law-and-order advocates urged its adoption.”

“If the new protocol is adopted by corrections officials and voters do not outlaw the death penalty next November, the state could theoretically begin executing 18 prisoners who have exhausted their appeals. Legal challenges to the lethal injection drug, however, could drag on for years.”

Opponents of the new plan insisted that it amounted to a trial-and-error approach. “The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California is suing to obtain at least 79,000 corrections department documents related to lethal injections,” KCRA noted. “It says the regulations may lack enough safeguards to prevent the state from using backdoor ways to obtain execution drugs that manufacturers never intended for that purpose.” Past cocktails have been harshly criticized for sometimes failing to execute inmates as quickly and painlessly as lethal injection was intended to do.

Languishing inmates

Much of the frustration around the issue stems from the unique backlog that has built up on the state’s Death Row. “It’s been 10 years since California executed its last death row inmate. Since then, the death row population has grown to 745,” KQED noted. “Since 1978, 117 death row inmates have died, the vast majority from natural causes and suicide.”

Although California’s Death Row has ballooned to an extraordinary size over the years, other states have found themselves burdened by court requirements in similar ways. Florida, second to California in the size of its death row population, recently faced a Supreme Court ruling that has thrown the status of its condemned inmates into question. “Death penalty prosecutions are stalled, and state lawmakers are hustling to write and pass a new death penalty law before their session ends in six weeks,” the New York Times reported. “Also in question is whether the 390 inmates awaiting execution in Florida will remain on death row or be resentenced to life in prison.” The predicament, which has gained the attention of reformers and activists across  the political spectrum, has contributed to the rise of execution reform as a hot-button issue around the country.

Divided opinion

California’s own controversy has strengthened amid a sharp divide in statewide public opinion over capital punishment. Voters, a new poll found, have “now equally divided between scrapping the death penalty altogether and speeding up the path to executing inmates on the nation’s largest death row,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. “The poll found that 47 percent of voters favor replacing the death penalty with life in prison without the possibility of parole in California, up from 40 percent in 2014. But at the same time, the poll shows that 48 percent of registered voters would support proposals to accelerate the state’s notoriously slow system of resolving death penalty appeals to pick up the pace of executions.” Both those proposals were likely to wind up on this election year’s ballot in the form of initiatives.

Opinions have split even among Death Row inmates themselves. “Opinions vary, just like I’m sure they vary on the outside,” one inmate, Charles Crawford II, told KQED. “Some of us are against it, some of us not so much. Some of us, it’s like if they’re going to do it, do it and not have us sittin’ here for 20 or 30 years.”

The Ed Source website has details:

The agreement settles [a suit] filed last year by students in high schools in Compton Unified, Los Angeles Unified and Oakland Unified. These students were regularly assigned to multiple classes where they were told to sit idly in classrooms or perform menial tasks, including picking up trash or cleaning erasers. Some students were also sent home as part of the class period.

 

The lawsuit alleged that the state failed to intervene when scheduling problems and inadequate course offerings at schools resulted in some students spending weeks in classes during which they received no instruction.

In a prepared statement, the lawyer leading the legal team representing the students at the schools predicted it would be broadly consequential. “[Our case] was the first in the nation to address the denial of equal learning time to children residing in many of California’s most disadvantaged communities and attending many of the most underperforming public schools,” wrote Mark Rosenbaum.

Washington Post offered scathing coverage

The fact that the Washington Post and other national publications reported on the case seemed to back up Rosenbaum’s assertion of its importance. The Post’s national education reporter, Emma Brown, depicted the lawsuit as an embarrassing reflection on how students were treated in some of California’s urban school districts:

The plaintiffs’ complaint said that schools didn’t have enough resources to offer a full menu of courses, leaving students in some cases without access to the courses they needed to graduate within four years …  [S]cheduling problems left students unassigned to classes for weeks at a time.

 

The problems were so bad at Jefferson High in Los Angeles that an Alameda County judge ordered state officials to intervene last year.

 

One student affected by Jefferson’s chaos was senior Jason Magana, who … took Graphic Design twice and then spent weeks trying to get out of taking it for a third time in order to take economics or government, courses he actually needed for graduation. He also was assigned two “Home” classes during eighth and ninth periods, which meant twice a week, his school day ended at 11:20 a.m. …

 

Under the settlement agreement, state education officials must help the six high schools deal with scheduling problems and get rid of their fake classes, which were called “College Class,” “Adult Class,” “Service,” and “Home.”

 

The state must also publicize the requirements of new legislation that was spurred by the lawsuit: AB1012, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law last month, prohibits high schools from assigning students to “any course period without educational content.”

 

Finally, state officials agreed to pay the plaintiffs $400,000 for their attorneys’ fees.

The students’ representation was handled by the ACLU  Foundation of Southern California and the Public Counsel organization.

Another ACLU suit could have huge impact

The ACLU is also part of a much bigger lawsuit against the Los Angles Unified School District that puts it on a collision course with Gov. Jerry Brown and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and could have a statewide effect.

The Brown administration and Torlakson have said that extra funds going to school districts with higher numbers of impoverished students, English learners and foster children can be used for broad teacher raises, not specifically to help those students. The ACLU says that violates the 2013 law establishing the Local Control Funding Formula. This is from its July 1 statement announcing the lawsuit.

LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles Unified School District is violating state law by refusing to use state education funds specifically targeted to help low-income students, English language learners and foster youth to increase or improve services for those students, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of the Community Coalition of South Los Angeles and LAUSD parent Reyna Frias.

 

The suit, filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court, asserts that the district has used improper accounting practices that subvert both the letter and spirit of the 2013 education finance reform law known as Local Control Funding Formula. If the district proceeds with its current plan, high need students stand to lose more than $2 billion in funding over the next decade.

 

“LAUSD is breaking its promise to provide my children and millions of other students in the future, with the services they need and the law says they should receive,” said Ms. Frias, whose children qualify for the funds targeted by LCFF.

The ACLU is partnering with Public Advocates and Covington & Burling LLP in bringing the case. A trial in the case is not expected to get underway until next year. Unlike what happened in Cruz v. California, a settlement is unlikely, since Local Control Funding Formula dollars have already been budgeted for employee compensation for years to come in L.A. Unified, the nation’s second largest school district.

The results of a new poll, touted by activist groups, revealed a constituency for continued re-adjustments in the balance between what law enforcement can do and what residents must expect.

Broad discontent

Commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union, the July survey found that “voters want increased access to police records, including misconduct investigations and body camera footage,” as the San Gabriel Valley Tribune reported, with 79 percent asking departments “to release their findings when an officer is investigated for wrong doing.”

A further 64 percent support the same practice, The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf observed, “anytime a cop is even accused.”

State law affords a level of privacy to officers that has remained among the most stringent in the country, the Tribune noted, “making it impossible for the public to know when or if an officer received discipline, regardless of the accusation.”

Skepticism toward law enforcement secrecy has cast suspicion on the groundbreaking use of body cameras adopted by the Los Angeles Police Department — a move seen until fairly recently as a great leap forward in official transparency. “The LAPD policy — approved by the Police Commission on a 3-1 vote in April — allows officers to review images from the cameras before writing reports or giving statements to internal investigators,” as the Los Angeles Times reported. “The department has also said it does not plan to publicly release the recordings unless they are part of a criminal or civil court proceeding.”

Attention around the poll was heightened as the Golden State headed into its latest high-profile ballot initiative season. With criminal justice and drug war issues at the forefront of many voters’ minds, some analysts detected “an opportunity for policing-reform activists and ambitious politicians” impatient to take on the state’s powerful police unions; “a statewide ballot initiative that takes aim at law-enforcement secrecy could win over voters in 2016,” suggested Friedersdorf.

Limited gains

Sacramento saw a spate of bills this year focused on reforming criminal justice and policing. One ongoing effort, to curb the excessive use of asset forfeiture laws, continued to work its way through the Assembly. Senate Bill 443, authored by Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, placed “additional restrictions on the state to prevent abuses from civil asset forfeiture, a controversial practice that observers such as the Institute for Justice have called ‘legal plunder,'” according to the Tenth Amendment Center.

But some proposals have run aground in Sacramento, setting legislators up for populist criticism that they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — deliver on their promises. “After vowing to tackle policing this year, California legislators have had a mixed record: a bill banning the use of grand juries to investigate officer killings became law, while measures regulating the use of police body cameras have stumbled,” as the Sacramento Bee noted.

“The remaining focus for civil liberties advocates is Assembly Bill 953, which would require local law enforcement to gather and report data on stops in an effort to suss out racial profiling. It cleared the Assembly floor on a narrow vote and, despite the opposition of law enforcement groups and an estimate that it would cost millions of dollars annually, got out of the Senate Appropriations Committee.”

AB953, named the Racial and Identity Profiling Act of 2015, has drawn the endorsement of the ACLU and minority rights groups. Introduced by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, the bill’s centerpiece reflected the view among supporters that policing standards could only be improved by centralizing them — altering California’s “state definition of profiling to include identity characteristics beyond race, creating a uniform system for collecting and reporting basic information on police-community interactions, and establishing an advisory board that develops solutions to curb profiling,” according to the ACLU. Current polling, the organization added, shows roughly two thirds of likely state voters approve of the legislation.