The government and over 900 LAPD cops do not want you to see these photos.
I faced two lawsuits by the City of Los Angeles — all because they regretted handing over photos of LAPD officers.
In 2022, the LA city attorney's office settled a lawsuit I brought forward to enforce my public records request for LAPD's roster and headshot photographs of its officers. On September 16th, 2022, I received the roster and photos directly from the city attorney's office, along with a letter from them stating that undercover officers were removed from the disclosure.
In March 2023, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition published a database containing the names, headshot photographs, serial numbers, and other publicly-available information for the officers contained in the roster given to me. It is the first time that members of the public can search online, for themselves, to see who is a cop at the LAPD.
Soon after the database was published, the Los Angeles Police Protective League's president went on Fox news to denounce the release of the public records. Many early reports classified the release of the records as a "leak".
In early April 2023, the City of LA sued me and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition in an unconstitutional attempt to "clawback" public records that had already been disseminated throughout the internet. The city claimed that they had "inadvertently" included photos of undercover officers. We, the defendants, filed separate anti-SLAPP motions to have the case dismissed against us, citing our First Amendment rights.
Besides the clawback demand, the city sought to make confidential every photo of every LAPD officer, a defacto way of creating a secret police force.
In June 2023, LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto lobbied state legislators to try and gut the California Public Records Act. Her revisions would, again, make secret the identities of every LAPD officer. So far, legislators have not picked up her revisions to the Act.
In August 2023, a judge denied our motion to dismiss the case and allowed the clawback effort to continue, something that was not even allowed for leaked, military intelligence documents. We appealed this decision.
In September 2023, while waiting for our hearing date in the court of appeals, hundreds of LAPD officers sued the city alleging they were put in danger by the photo release. They claimed to be the undercover officers who the city "inadvertently" released photos of.
In January 2024, LA City Attorney Hydee Soto Feldstein doubled down on the city's attacks on the freedom of the press and sued me and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition for a second time. This time, the city attempted to have the coalition and I pay the damages that the hundreds of allegedly-undercover officers were seeking from the city itself. This came at time when the future of local media was being, and still is being, threatened.
We, again, filed motions to dismiss the claims.
In April 2024, the city reached out regarding the first case, offering to pay for a full day of mediation to reach a settlement. At the mediation the following month, a $300,000 settlement was agreed upon. The clawback case stopped there, but the notion that government and police agencies can censor public information through clawbacks has continued to spread.
In June 2024, the second case against us was dismissed. A judge cited our First Amendment rights in his opinion.
As of November 2024, the case between the cops and the city continues. Now that the city is solely on the hook for what could amount to millions of dollars in damages, it chose to argue what we had been arguing since the start-- that none of the cops in the LAPD headshots release are undercover cops.
It was all a lie.
At a hearing on November 18th, 2024, the city implied that the cops' attorneys should go after the database, instead of just pursuing a check from the city.
You can download the original headshot release here: https://ddosecrets.com/article/lapd-headshots