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Costanza comments on $295 bounty for new Singularity Institute logo design (crowd-sourced competition) - Less Wrong
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You're right. Traditional pro bono work generally is undertaken on behalf of parties who are unable to pay steep legal fees, or else in order to advance civil rights or some similar purpose.
Prosecuting low-level crimes is considered one of the ordinary functions of government, or at least it has been until now.
There are two implications here I'm not entirely certain of.
The first is that enforcing laws is not a "similar purpose" as above.
The second is that the government soliciting volunteers to perform a task constitutes no longer considering that task a function of government.
In the modern context, I don't think there's necessarily a principled distinction. The Long Beach city government is probably being pretty smart. Still, in a historical context, this is a big change. In the English-speaking world, standing national armies are relatively new, and government-paid firefighters and police forces are even newer. But employees of the state (or the king) have been prosecuting crimes since (checking Wikipedia)...at least 1243 .