Update: On March 30, the Baton Rouge Police Department released disturbing body camera video of the police killing of Alton Sterling, and announced that Officer Blane Salamoni, who shot Sterling six times, would be fired.

On March 27, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry announced that his office would not bring criminal charges against the two police officers who shot and killed Alton Sterling as he lay pinned by them to the ground in front of a convenience store in Baton Rouge.

Attorney General Landry’s decision is two contradictory things: It is shocking, and it is unsurprising. The decision sends a clear message about policing in America today, and highlights the continuing crisis of accountability when it comes to unlawful use of excessive and deadly force by police.

The failure to hold police accountable for the killings of Black men and boys is standard practice at both the local and federal level. Last year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the nation’s so-called “top cop,” and his Department of Justice concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring federal civil rights charges against the officers involved in Sterling’s death. And, while the Baton Rouge Police Chief said disciplinary hearings would be held for the officers this week, the officers who killed Sterling, and whose killing of Sterling was caught on video, both remain employed by the Baton Rouge Police Department.

Sterling was one of 233 Black people shot and killed by the police in 2016. And while the national media spotlight on police violence has faded, the death toll has remained steady. The Washington Post Police Shooting Database records show 2934 people shot and killed by police between 2015 and 2017. That’s nearly 1000 deaths per year. Earlier this month, police officers in Sacramento fired 20 rounds at Stephon Clark, who was unarmed and standing in his own backyard. He died of the wounds inflicted on him by law enforcement. As did Danny Ray Thomas, another unarmed Black man, a man in mental distress, who was killed by police in Harris County, Texas, just days ago.

Sterling’s death is a glaring reminder that police officers too often use aggressive tactics and excessive force, informed by implicit bias rather than community protection. Upon first arriving at the scene, one of the officers reportedly put a gun to Sterling’s head and said “I’ll kill you, bitch.” The AG’s report describes the officer as giving Sterling a “stern” warning: “Don’t fucking move or I’ll shoot you in your fucking head.”

A death threat is not an acceptable warning. And, coming from police and directed at Black and brown people, it is too often a promise. The ACLU of Louisiana and partner organizations are working to reform police practices to combat these killings.

Some reforms are already under way. In November 2016, the Baton Rouge Police Department, the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office, the Louisiana State Police, and the City of Baton Rouge committed to use only the level of force objectively reasonable to bring an incident under control, and use deescalation techniques when dealing with protesters. Baton Rouge Mayor Sharon Weston Broome, who took office in January 2017, has successfully pushed for implicit bias training, a stronger use-of-force policy, and expanded the use of body cameras to the entire police force.

That the officers who killed Sterling have not been charged is by no means the end of this fight. There are questions that must be answered about Sterling’s death, and we demand that all body camera and surveillance footage of the incident be released. We demand accountability, equal justice, and an end to racialized policing.

Alton Sterling didn’t have to die on the pavement that night. The Baton Rouge police officers chose aggression. They chose to shoot Sterling six times. We must address and dismantle the conditions that led the officers to use deadly force when it was not needed or legal. We must end the epidemic of police violence once and for all — and bring accountability to this broken system.

Joshua Block, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU LGBT & HIV Project
& Chase Strangio, Staff Attorney, ACLU LGBT & HIV Project

& James Esseks, Director, ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Project

After four separate courts blocked the Trump administration’s ban on transgender people serving in the military, the White House announced a new plan to carry out the ban on March 23. How is this possible? And what does this mean?

We sat down with three lawyers from our LGBT & HIV Project — Josh Block, Chase Strangio, and James Esseks — to break it down.

Last week, the Trump administration announced a new plan to implement the ban on trans people serving in the military. What does that policy actually do?

Josh: They are calling it a new policy, but it’s really just following through on what Trump ordered last year. He told the military last year to ban transgender people from serving. Last week the military did it.

Chase: Yes, it is just the military's implementation of his order to ban trans people from serving. There is nothing new. The implementation of Trump's plan, which was released last Friday, is a wholesale ban on trans people serving, just like Trump asked for when he first tweeted.

Can some trans people stay in the military?

Josh: Yes, they made an exception to the policy for people who are already in the military and diagnosed with gender dysphoria to get around the court orders in place. But that is a small exception. The actual policy is that if you are transgender, you can't serve.

So trans people can't enlist unless they serve as the gender they were assigned at birth?

Chase: Correct, and only if they have taken no steps to transition of any kind. So really: Trans people can't enlist. Also, many trans people do have gender dysphoria and if they have access to a doctor, a diagnosis. But, for people currently serving, many were serving in the shadows before the previous ban was lifted in 2016 so do not have that documentation.

James: The implementation policy says that trans folks who don't want to transition, who don't suffer any dysphoria because of being trans, and who can serve in their assigned sex at birth can enlist or serve. But do those people even exist?

Chase: I don't think those people exist. Or if they do, they aren't trans.

What about trans people who are already enlisted/currently serving?

Chase: In theory, they can stay in the military if they are out now and have a diagnosis. But what we don't know is what kind of punishment they will face for being trans: lack of promotions, denial of deployment, forced discharge for pretextual reasons.

So there's a chance that if you're currently in the military and you come out as trans, you could be discharged?

Josh: If this new policy goes into effect, anyone who comes out as trans for the first time will be affected.

Didn't the court already strike this ban down multiple times? How can they do this?

Josh: They can't. That's why the government is asking the courts to dissolve their injunctions. The government is pretending that they have now gone through an independent analysis that is not infected by Trump's transparent discriminatory intent. It's very similar to the games the government has played with the Muslim ban. Pretending to pass a new policy and then claiming it isn't tainted by Trump's unconstitutional orders.

So the government is claiming it has new evidence that should be sufficient justification for the ban moving forward?

Josh: They were supposed to study the issue and claim to have found “new evidence” to support the ban. But that "new evidence" is mostly data from before transgender people were allowed to serve openly.

Chase: And it isn't even really much evidence at that. It is a lot of uncited ideological polemics about how trans people are just inherently devious and threaten the privacy of others with no support for any of it, which is why they have been condemned, for example, by the APA:

“The American Psychological Association is alarmed by the administration’s misuse of psychological science to stigmatize transgender Americans and justify limiting their ability to serve in uniform and access medically necessary health care."

Why do you all think the Trump administration is choosing the military as the vehicle for its anti-trans agenda?

Chase: Well they certainly aren't limiting their attacks to the military. They have attacked us in the context of education, employment, health care and housing. It is an all-out assault.

Josh: Right. The simple answer is that the administration wants to encourage discrimination against trans people any time it has power to do so. But the military does have a special salience on our society. Excluding trans people from the military sends a powerful message that trans people are not part of the fabric of American civic life.

What can people do?

Chase: People can support trans people in their lives, and make clear publicly that they oppose this administration's efforts to erase and target us. They can fight discrimination at the federal, state and local levels.

Add your name to stop Trump's ban on transgender military service

Anything else you think people should know?

Chase: It is important that we keep in mind this is part of an effort to confuse and exhaust us and it is part of the same strategy of this administration to roll back civil rights protections and target particular groups of people and communities. The injunctions are still in place so for now they are blocked from implementing any of this. We are fighting to keep it that way and will keep fighting.

Earlier this month Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney for Cook County, Illinois, which covers Chicago, released six years’ worth of raw data regarding felony prosecutions in her office. It was a simple yet profound act of good governance, and one that is all too rare among the nation’s elected prosecutors. Foxx asserted that “for too long, the work of the criminal justice system has been largely a mystery. That lack of openness undermines the legitimacy of the criminal justice system.”

She’s right on both counts.

The trove itself is massive — roughly 45 million sortable, searchable data points spanning tens of thousands of cases from investigation to resolution. Granted, the data covers a period prior to Foxx’s ascension (2010 to 2016). However, it’s her office and her budget that are on the hook for any inquiries, legal or otherwise, that the data begets. More importantly, she’s set a precedent of transparency that will be hard to abandon when it comes time to release data about her own performance in office. (Indeed, she simultaneously released a 2017 “data report” that summarizes her office’s work over the past year, though not the underlying raw data.)

This is real accountability. Unfortunately, it’s sorely lacking in most of America’s top prosecutors, which is ironic for a group whose very job is to hold others to account. Most prosecutors’ offices are chronically allergic to sunlight. They routinely fight public records requests and legislative transparency efforts, often claiming, somewhat perversely, that public safety would be harmed if the public knew how its safety was being achieved.

But what if the prosecutors are the ones doing the harming? How are we to know? And how can we cast informed votes or tell our prosecutors to adjust their priorities if we don’t know how those priorities are being implemented on the ground?

Raw data can help us answer these questions, which is why transparency is a necessary tool to remake our broken criminal justice system. Prosecutors, after all, are elected officials who have played a significant role in the nation’s mass incarceration crisis. Without the relevant raw data on how prosecutors wield their immense power, voters will have a more difficult time electing those who are committed to reforming the system in a deliberate and transparent way.

Data transparency also promotes justice. Defense attorneys can use data to assure fairer outcomes for their clients, particularly minorities who receive harsher sentencing recommendations from prosecutors for the same crimes as their non-minority counterparts. The data can identify patterns of constitutional violations that can be rectified by prosecutors’ offices, state oversight agencies, or, where necessary, outside civil rights organizations. In Louisiana, the ACLU and Civil Rights Corps have sued to end a secret witness intimidation program that DA Leon Cannizzaro’s office fought to keep secret by — you guessed it — opposing public records requests.

Prosecutors themselves can also benefit from releasing their data. It shows that they have nothing to hide and, when crime goes down, they can claim verifiable credit. That’s the thing about data: If collected honestly and thoroughly, it does not lie – which makes opposition inherently suspect.

Transparency is also a smart move for prosecutors who want to stay in office. Voters overwhelmingly support increased transparency in the criminal justice system, and a recent ACLU national poll showed that a whopping 85 percent of voters are much more likely to support a prosecutor who believes in sharing data and policies with the public.

Whatever Foxx’s data ultimately reveals, the release itself is a vital signal that she does not intend to hide from her constituents. She and a few others have proven it can be done. Now your local prosecutor — your local elected prosecutor, that is — has no excuse. Show us the data, or we’ll show you the door.