Los Angeles paid out $18 million this spring to settle a lawsuit over an LAPD high-speed crash, and the city didn’t write that check without a fight.
Los Angeles City Controller Kenneth Mejia flagged the settlement publicly, calling it the largest single liability payout for the city this fiscal year. The facts of the case aren’t complicated: an LAPD officer ran through an intersection in Encino at high speed, hit another car, and left two elderly brothers with life-threatening injuries. The city went all the way to trial before agreeing to settle while a jury was already seated and waiting.
Mejia’s public post cut to the real question. Why do cities routinely make seriously injured people wait years, drag them through litigation, and only open the checkbook when a jury’s in the box?
Robert Glassman knows the answer. He’s a Los Angeles attorney at Panish Shea Ravipudi who represented the plaintiffs in this case, and he’s watched this pattern repeat itself enough times that he can describe it without hesitation. When government agencies cause catastrophic harm, he said, the criminal justice system frequently doesn’t deliver anything that looks like accountability. That’s not a complaint. It’s a structural reality, and it’s why civil court ends up carrying the load.
“In many cases involving government misconduct or negligence, the criminal justice system provides little meaningful accountability,” Glassman told CalMatters in a 2026 piece on the two-track system. “Charges may be reduced, penalties may be minimal and the conduct that caused devastating harm can fade from public view long before victims receive answers.”
That gap isn’t accidental. Criminal courts in the American legal system require guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, the highest evidentiary bar that exists. The standard serves a real purpose. It’s meant to protect people from the state’s enormous power to imprison them, and it prevents wrongful convictions. But that same standard creates a situation where institutional failures, reckless conduct by government employees, or chronic supervision breakdowns can produce devastating injuries without ever generating criminal penalties proportionate to what happened.
Civil courts work differently. Juries there don’t measure guilt. They weigh whether it’s more likely than not that a defendant’s conduct caused the harm. That’s a lower threshold, but it’s not a technicality or a workaround. It’s the mechanism specifically designed for cases where someone got seriously hurt and the criminal system can’t reach a conviction.
Glassman’s point is that the civil process itself does something the criminal process often won’t. Discovery in civil litigation gives plaintiffs the power to compel sworn depositions, subpoena internal records, and drag institutional documents into public court filings. Training manuals that agencies don’t volunteer. Supervision logs. Internal communications about safety failures that managers knew about and didn’t fix. These records surface in civil cases in ways that rarely happen when a criminal prosecution collapses or never gets filed at all.
That’s where the systemic argument gains traction. Settlements and verdicts in civil cases don’t just compensate victims, though that’s the primary function. They also expose the specific policy breakdowns that agencies would otherwise handle quietly inside their own bureaucracies. When a city’s liability becomes public and the court record documents what actually failed, the political pressure to correct those failures goes up. Glassman’s argument, and it’s a defensible one, is that civil litigation functions as a kind of external accountability mechanism in cases where internal accountability didn’t do the job.
The $18 million figure is what Mejia chose to make visible. It’s the number that shows up in the city’s books and in the controller’s public posts. What doesn’t always make it into those posts is the longer accounting: the two elderly men whose injuries the city contested through years of litigation, the officer whose driving produced the crash, and the question of whether anything actually changed inside LAPD’s policies as a result. Glassman’s clients got a settlement. Whether the institution got anything more than a large bill is a separate question, and it’s the one that doesn’t have an automatic answer.
In 2026, with California cities facing mounting liability exposure and scrutiny over how they handle misconduct cases, Mejia’s decision to post about the settlement publicly was its own kind of pressure.