The Los Angeles district attorney has dropped felony charges against a police officer who secretly recorded his colleagues making racist remarks.
Los Angeles Police Department Officer Daniel Flores was charged in July with 16 felony counts after submitting audio to internal affairs in early 2025. The tapes, recorded within the LAPD’s recruitment division, captured officers making explicit remarks and were first disclosed by the Los Angeles Times.
District Attorney Nathan Hochman had initially charged Flores under California’s decades-old eavesdropping statute, which mandates the consent of all parties present to legally record conversations. The original charges carried a maximum sentence of 13 years in prison.
The charges sparked swift backlash, particularly from Flores’ attorney, Alan Jackson. Speaking to the LA Times in July, Jackson warned that the case communicated that “if you document bigotry inside the LAPD, you will be the one who ends up in a courtroom. It tells them the safe move is to hear slurs and say nothing.”
The Whistleblower gets in trouble, not the offending LAPD Officers. There is no accountability left in American Police Forces.
Never was
Yep this is pretty similar to all the recordings of LASD officer Mark Furman from the 1980s where he said all kinds of similar things that were later leaked when he was acting as the star witness in the OJ Simpson trial. Police departments have always been a haven for racist, bigoted gang members.
Police departments have always been a
haven forracist, bigoted gangmembers.
There was once, his name was Chris Dorner.
And in response to him whistleblowing, his fellow boys in blue barricaded him in a cabin from the outside to prevent any chance of reasonable surrender, and then lit the building on fire and watched him burn alive for amusement until he decided to blow his brains out to avoid one of the most gruesome, painful, and slow deaths possible.
The media and courts didn’t bat an eye at this because extrajudicial murder by arson is just SOP for an agency with actual, legitimately documented organized crime groups in its ranks.
Can’t corner the dorner! God I miss old 4 chan sometimes (not really but it had its moments)
Can’t corner the dorner!
Got some bad spoilers for you about the series finale.
Rest in power.
🫡
Look into Serpico, a whistleblowing cop who was set up to be killed by the department back in 1970’s NY. There’s a great movie about the incident starring Al Pacino, too.
What rock have you been living under? It’s not even that there has never been accountability in the “American Police Forces”, there’s never been accountability in any place of power in the US. This is true for a most of the world throughout all of history but since the thread is about the US I chose to reference that specifically.
Hochman stated that his office was “listening to the impact the case was having on potential whistleblowers” when deciding to scale back the charges, acknowledging that the initial prosecution “sent the wrong message” to the public. While describing the comments by the other officers as “hate speech,” the district attorney noted there was insufficient evidence of a hate crime to bring criminal charges against them.
Fuck Hochman. There should never have been charges, and the racist pigs should have been fired. Charging a good faith whistleblower with any crime is vile. Hochman is lawless, fascist scum.
Yeah, he didn’t like the press his efforts were bringing, so he backtracked. If this hadn’t hit the news he’d be happily prosecuting.
The shit-eating fucker is still prosecuting, but as misdemeanors instead of felonies.
Well I feel confident saying that any defense attorney who goes up against them would have a real easy job if I were on the jury. Maybe they can’t be arrested, but holy shit can they become a liability to the force
Remember to play it close to the vest during jury selection.
Yep. But also, for an opportunity to get on my soapbox, if you don’t genuinely need to not serve in jury duty, don’t try to get out of it. When we have a culture where everyone tries to get out of jury duty we find ourselves in a society where laws are enforced by people too dumb to get kicked out of a jury.
California is a two party consent state. He broke the law by recording them, and should be charged just as a civilian would. Or harsher because he’s a cop.
But yes, the other cops should be fired.
The Constitution gives us the right to record our government officials in the performance of their duties.
Furthermore, whistleblower protections exist precisely for cases like this where something much more important is being uncovered.
recording your coworkers joking that someone died from eating too many tacos isn’t really a case of whistleblowing because saying racist stuff isn’t illegal. so this isn’t precisely why whistleblowing laws exist at all.
I think people in positions of power should not be racist fuckwits making light of rape, but fuck me, right?
relying on racist tropes about Black people, and describing a young LAPD recruit as “rapeable” because they were “someone who could be taken advantage of.”
The bigger issue there is the implication that they themselves commit rapes on vulnerable people.
Is consent required when the flock cameras record you?
Not in most jurisdictions where the concept of “expectation of privacy” (and the lack of it in public) exists
he maintained that Flores should face consequences for breaking privacy laws. He expressed hope that the decision would encourage future whistleblowers to work alongside prosecutors through authorized channels.
Flores was previously found guilty in a separate internal LAPD inquiry and handed a 22-day suspension without pay
The department also initiated confidential disciplinary proceedings against the officers who made the remarks, but has not confirmed whether any disciplinary action has been enforced.
“We hope this helps more whistleblowers come forward!” says the guy that punished the whistleblower and didn’t do shit to the racist trash. 🙄 🙄 🙄
Additionally this misdemeanor sentence is reliant upon Flores “not breaking the law at any time within the year of his probationary period.” How much you wanna bet these asshole cops absolutely hound this man for anything and everything? 100% they will stalk this man.
Resulting once again in all cops being bastards.
The confidential disciplinary proceeding was making the racist cops man the barbeque at the cookout and their beers weren’t allowed to be cold.
Cops just can’t help being a fucking criminal gang. ACAB because the police fucking terrorize and murder any good cop willing to hold them accountable.
This exemplifies the fundamental issue we have with police in the US
Poor behavior by cops isn’t corrected. Anyone holding cops accountable, however, is punished
When good cops sit around letting bad cops do bad things, they all become bad cops. Most officers are unwilling to step in and stop a bad cop due to the culture around policing
One bad apple spoils the bunch. In the police… there are so many bad apples…
ACAB
This is one of those things that always puts me on the fence about two party states. Like on the one hand I understand why you would want everybody to know they’re being recorded especially on like phone calls, on the other hand these cops definitely wouldn’t have said anything if they knew they were being recorded and then this shit happens.
I’d think that, since this conversation happened on public property, and the conversation was among public servants, the conversation is subject to the same standards as any other public conversation.
Maybe the legal system is too stupid for that, though.
My essential problem with the concept of two party consent is that the problem isn’t, and never has been, people recording things that they personally see or hear.
The problem is what they do with those recordings.
I think if a person has real memory problems and records audio of all their conversations just so they can make notes for themselves later, few would find fault with that, regardless of consent.
If a person recorded everything but is was like a black box on an airplane, literally only reviewed after something horrible happens to the person but otherwise inaccessible to them or anyone else, I think few would have a problem with that.
If you’re recording people with the intent to distribute the recordings or to train AI, many people would have a problem with that.
Maybe you can achieve something reasonable with two party and reasonable exceptions, just to make it easier on law enforcement. But I tend to think it makes more sense to start with one party consent and then strictly control what people can do or intend to do with recordings that lack consent.
