In response to the July 5th beating death by Fullerton Police of 37-year-old Kelly Thomas, a homeless man with schizophrenia, ACLU of Southern California Executive Director Hector Villagra released the following statement:

“While much of what led to Kelly Thomas’ death is still hazy, several things are already crystal clear now.

We are pleased that the FBI will investigate Thomas’ death.  Although Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas reportedly has some two dozen investigators working on the case, interviewing up to 100 witnesses, the district attorney has an abysmal track record when it comes to investigating and prosecuting officer-involved deaths.

In 2004, an investigation by the O.C. Weekly found that of 50 officer-involved shootings in the previous five years, not a single one was pursued for prosecution by the D.A.’s office.  In 2007, the D.A. cleared two Huntington Beach officers in the shooting death of Ashley McDonald, who was shot 15 times after brandishing a knife.

The bottom line is that the district attorney’s office is simply not the body to conduct an independent investigation. These are prosecutors accustomed to working with police officers and building their cases with the assistance of police officers.  A thorough, impartial inquiry requires investigators who are not in daily contact with police; indeed, whose daily work doesn’t require police cooperation.

We call on Fullerton Police and the district attorney’s office to release a full accounting of what took place, including the release of additional videos from the bus depot showing the beating.  The district attorney’s office has said those videos may present a different picture of the incident; we won’t know until they’re shared with the public.

The incident also spotlights the complete lack in Orange County of government services for the mentally ill and chronically homeless populations. Without such services, tragic incidents like this will continue to occur, as police officers, improperly trained in identifying people with mental illness or de-escalating encounters with them, are called upon to respond to homeless individuals with untreated illnesses." 

A previous version of this page mistakenly referred to an investigation conducted by the LA Weekly.  The investigation was in fact conducted by the O.C. Weekly.  We regret the error.

The Obama administration’s Justice Department took a swing at the rights of all Americans this week.

In February, the ACLU and other groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of Southern California Muslims who were subjected to unlawful FBI surveillance on the basis of their religion. Between 2006 and 2007, the FBI paid an Irvine man to misrepresent his identity and infiltrate several mainstream mosques in order to collect the personal information of hundreds of Muslim Americans living in the area.
On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder asserted that the lawsuit should be dismissed based on the “state secrets” privilege. According to the government, whether or not the FBI violated the First Amendment right of American citizens to freely practice their religion is a state secret.
Students of the Bush administration should remember the state secrets privilege from its frequent application in covering up human rights abuses. Lawsuits filed against the system of CIA black sites where suspects of terrorism-- some of whom were innocent-- were detained and tortured, as well as against the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, were both dismissed using the state secrets doctrine.
During his campaign, President Obama attacked these abuses and actually promised to reform the state secrets program. But talk is cheap. Since taking office Obama has defended several of the prior administration’s legal positions on state secrets.
This week, however, brought a new low in the invidious history of the state secrets privilege: the administration asserted the privilege in an attempt to dismiss a lawsuit brought by United States citizens, challenging the constitutionality of an operation, conducted by a domestic law enforcement agency on American soil. In fact, the government says, it’s not only a state secret to disclose who FBI agents surveilled. It’s also a secret whom they weren’t surveilling.
This view of the state secrets doctrine represents an assault on our constitutional system. If the government’s assertion of the state secrets privilege in this case were accepted, then an FBI program to arrest American citizens on the basis of their race (or a government-backed campaign to detain its political opponents) would be immunized from constitutional challenge in the courts -- as long as the government says that doing so would protect national security. Closing the courthouse door, as the government sought to do on Monday, would effectively place the FBI’s conduct beyond judicial review.
The framers of the Constitution created three co-equal branches of government to protect against precisely this kind of abuse of power. If the Obama administration’s view is upheld, the courts will be closed to citizens who seek to stop the government from violating their constitutional rights right here in the United States.
Let’s hope that the federal courts put a stop to these abuses-- starting with this case.
 
Ahilan T. Arulanantham is the Deputy Legal Director of the ACLU of Southern California.

Demanding to know when, why, and how police are using mobile phone location data and deploying other surveillance technologies to track the people they are responsible for protecting and serving, the ACLU of California sent requests to more than fifty law enforcement agencies across the state today.

Today’s requests are part of the ACLU’s Demand your dotRights Campaign, designed to make sure that as technology advances, our privacy rights are not left behind. The Public Request Act inquiries are being filed in coordination with 33 American Civil Liberties Union affiliates across the nation.  

“The public has a right to know how and under what circumstances their personal information is being accessed by the government," said Peter Bibring, staff attorney with the ACLU of California. "A detailed history of someone's movements – or the email and photographs stored in their mobile device - is extremely personal and exactly the kind of private information that the Fourth Amendment was written to protect." 

In addition to the collection of mobile phone location data, the ACLU of California is asking the same questions about law enforcements’ use of information gathered from social networking sites, book providers, GPS tracking devices, automatic license plate readers, public video surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology.

Police agencies are being asked for information including:

• Statistics on how agencies are obtaining, using, storing and sharing personal information;
• The stated purpose for gathering personal information, guidelines on how long the data is kept, when and how it is deleted, and whether privacy safeguards exist;
• Training curricula, policies or protocol provided to officers to guide them in the use of these powerful new surveillance tools, including the capture of information from social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter; 
• Whether police demonstrate probable cause and obtain a warrant to access mobile phone location data and to collect other detailed personal information, or take a dragnet approach that captures data on individuals who are not suspected of wrongdoing; 
• The effectiveness of the use of digital surveillance in identifying or arresting suspects.

“Unless we require transparency on the part of police agencies, powerful new methods of surveillance will become powerful new methods of invading our privacy,” said ACLU of California attorney Linda Lye.

Privacy is a top concern for mobile phone users for good reason:

• In just a 13-month period, Sprint received over 8 million demands for location information; Michigan police sought information about every mobile phone near the site of a planned labor protest; 
• This spring, researchers revealed that iPhones were collecting and storing location information; 
• Just last week, the general counsel of the National Security Agency suggested to members of Congress that the NSA might have the authorityto collect the location information of American citizens inside the U.S. 

With Congress considering new legislation to better safeguard location information and the U.S. Supreme Court poised to hear a case about the privacy of location data in the context of GPS tracking devices, it is essential for the American public to have a clear picture about when, why, and how law enforcement are obtaining sensitive location information.

“It’s important to understand whether police agencies are using new surveillance technologies in ways that serve legitimate law enforcement goals and actually make us safer,” said ACLU of California attorney David Blair Loy.  More information about the national effort to collect similar information in other states across the nation is available at: ACLU.org/locationtracking