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 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?
The bigger issue there is the implication that they themselves commit rapes on vulnerable people.