A legal battle has erupted in Los Angeles over the release of sensitive information of undercover police officers to a local watchdog group, with multiple claims being filed this week.
On April 5, a day after nearly 400 officers filed legal claims against the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) regarding the issue, the city sued a Los Angeles reporter and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition for publishing sensitive information that was released by the city last month from a 2021 public records request.
The coalition published the sensitive information, which includes officers’ email, ethnicity, gender, division, rank, and year they were hired, last month on its newly-established “Watch the Watchers” police surveillance website. Contained in the data dump was also information about undercover officers.
“I have several anecdotes of undercover officers already being compromised,” attorney Matthew McNicholas, who is one of the lawyers representing 387 LAPD police officers who have filed claims since the data leak, told The Epoch Times. “Like people going to their neighborhoods looking for them and making threats.”
McNicholas said there have been several suspensions of current undercover cases due to the data leak.
“The real threat here is not Watch the Watchers, the real threat is somebody that is computer savvy that’s already pulled off all that information,” he said. “It’s already been downloaded tens of thousands of times.”
Shakeer Rahman, the attorney defending the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition against the city, told The Epoch Times in a statement that the information released are “public records that the city itself made public.”
“That means the public has every right to publish them. This lawsuit is an effort to intimidate LAPD’s critics and expand the term ‘undercover’ to mean every single police officer,” he said.
“The City Attorney stated repeatedly that they removed undercover officers from the photos they made public. Police and the public will never agree on what ‘undercover’ means. That long-standing debate is not a basis to declare that records made public by LAPD using one definition are suddenly illegal to publish,” he added.
The LAPD mistakenly released the names and photos in September of every undercover officer—excluding “650” officers, which are officers off the books who do clandestine investigations of other officers—to journalist Ben Camacho from Knock LA, a nonprofit newsroom sprouted from the progressive advocacy organization Ground Game LA.
“Public records are for the public,” Camacho wrote on Twitter April 5.
Camacho then passed on the information to the police surveillance group, according to McNicholas, which then posted the photos and information of the officers to its website the weekend of March 17.
On March 30 and again on April 5, the city attorney’s office sent letters to both Camacho and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, requesting that they return the flash drive which contained the photos and delete all digital copies of the contents.
Following a formal complaint against LAPD filed on March 20 by the Los Angeles Police Protective League—the police union representing over 9,000 sworn officers—Chief Michel Moore asked the police department’s Office of the Inspector General to take over the internal investigation he had launched following the leak to avoid a conflict of interest.
The investigation will include the department’s constitutional policing director Liz Rhodes, who according to an April 4 story in the Los Angeles Times, was responsible for ensuring undercover officers were excluded from the request.
“It became readily apparent that the Department had released, and not redacted, the names and photographs of officers engaged in sensitive investigative assignments, placing their lives and the lives of their families in extreme jeopardy and peril,” police union president Craig D. Lally said in a March 20 letter to the LAPD commission.
“What we find ironic is that, apparently, the Department did redact the names and photographs of officers engaged in investigating alleged officer misconduct yet did not redact officers working sensitive assignments. Who made the decision to release information on those in sensitive investigative assignments and to conceal officers investigating officers?”
In response to the city’s lawsuit, Knock LA issued a statement April 5 criticizing the city’s recently elected city attorney.
“Knock LA condemns this irresponsible, ignorant action by Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto, against reporter Ben Camacho. This action sets a dangerous precedent for journalists in the city of Los Angeles,” the statement read. “Feldstein Soto’s actions are a clear intimidation tactic fueled by the Los Angeles Police Protective League [LAPPL].”
