After handing over images of more than 9,300 LAPD officers, the city is now trying to force the site that posted them to take them down.
This information was shared “inadvertently”: this is what the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office claims, after local police released photos and details of more than 9,300 of its officers, including in undercover, in response to a public records request. But nothing is less certain.
Agent photos, names, ranks, ethnicities, hire dates, divisions and offices, and badge numbers are now accessible online in a database called “Watch the Watchers” (literally, “to watch over those who watch over us”), revealed the Los Angeles Times last March.
The site was started by an activist organization, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which opposes intelligence gathering by the city’s police and advocates for its reform. The Los Angeles police are regularly accused of excessive use of force. In early January, within days, three mentally ill African Americans were died during their arrest.
“We don’t publish their home addresses, or things that don’t relate to their role as police officers,” defends Hamid Khan, one of the leaders of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.
Photos “delivered by hand”
The union that represents ordinary police officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had sued Chief Michel Moore over the disclosure of this information. Since then, more than 300 of the officers concerned have said they are ready to take legal action against the city of Los Angeles.
In return, the city continues now Ben Camacho, “citizen journalist” (a notion that exists in the United States to qualify citizens carrying out journalistic work, often for an militant purpose) who obtained this information and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, to whom he gave it . The city’s lawyers assure that this step is intended to protect the police officers “whose lives and those of their family members are seriously endangered by this public display”.
This information would in fact have been communicated voluntarily by the city, and not “inadvertently” or by “error”, assures Susan Seager, Ben Camacho’s lawyer. She claims the Los Angeles DA’s office “hand-delivered” the photos last September, along with a letter stating: “images of officers working undercover at the time these photographs were uploaded (end of July 2022) are not included”.
The experts interviewed by the Los Angeles Times also conclude that the removal of the images seems unjustifiable before the American justice, which according to them privileges the right of the press to divulge information, even classified secret-defense or being able to compromise the security of the country.
