Support Your Local Police

It appears that the LAPD, in response to legislation mandating more open access to police records, is unlawfully clawing back data that has already been released, and threatening people who have legally accessed that data in an attempt to cover the information up.

One of the tactics that they are using that they have redefined an undercover cop to be any cop who had ever been undercover or who might possibly be undercover in the future.

So basically, all cops that are on the force, or any cop that ever was or will be on the force, can have nothing released about them.

So Reed and Malloy are safe, I guess:

Last week, the city of Los Angeles filed a lawsuit against Ben Camacho, a local journalist, as well as the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community watchdog group that opposes police surveillance, in an attempt to censor a database of Los Angeles Police Department officer headshot photos. The lawsuit alleges that Camacho and the watchdog group are in “wrongful possession” of 9,310 headshots, which the city itself released to Camacho as part of a settlement in response to a public records lawsuit.

The city’s lawsuit was denounced as meritless by First Amendment experts. “Once the government gives you information in good faith, you have the right to publish it under the First Amendment,” David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, told The Intercept. “This is not even a close case.”

The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition launched a website called Watch the Watchers that includes the LAPD headshots. The dataset has also been published by Distributed Denial of Secrets, or DDoSecrets, using the censorship-resistant technology BitTorrent, and posted on the Internet Archive. Even if the court ruled in favor of the city, these public records have long since escaped the LAPD’s grasp.

………

At its core, this case appears to be about the definition of the word “undercover.” The flash drive full of LAPD headshots that the city gave Camacho excluded undercover officers. But after the police union took note of the Watch the Watchers website, they argued for a vastly expanded definition of the word in an effort to claw back the public records.

According to an interview in the Los Angeles Times by the union’s legal counsel, Robert Rico, the expanded definition of “undercover” includes any officer who conducts surveillance (even if they wear normal police uniforms) and any officer who has worked undercover or at a sensitive assignment in the past. The union’s director, Jamie McBride, argued in a TV interview that it should also include any officer who may work undercover in the future.

………

To Shakeer Rahman, an attorney with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the implications are troubling. “They’re openly calling for a secret police force,” Rahman said.

While most of us are not enthusiastic about the idea of a police state, the cops love the idea of a police state, because it preserves their privilege and removes accountability.

………

Last month, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition launched Watch the Watchers, which allows the public to look up LAPD officers by name to see their headshots and includes information such as serial numbers, ranks, ethnicities, and email addresses — all public information that LAPD itself publishes. “This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices,” the website states. “You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community.”

“LAPD has always published full rosters of all of its officers,” Rahman said. “They had already published a roster of all of those names, identities, rank, positions, division. These aren’t secret identities. They’re very, very public.”

ACAB.