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.”
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.
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.
The confidential disciplinary proceeding was making the racist cops man the barbeque at the cookout and their beers weren’t allowed to be cold.
First time I’ve heard of a cop getting a suspension WITHOUT pay.
It’s because he did a good thing, which basically made him not a cop anymore…
Resulting once again in all cops being bastards.
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.
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.
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.
🫡
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.
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…
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
That’s the thing… You don’t have to do an actual crime to be reprimanded or dismissed by your employer. I imagine that committing hate speech is a fireable offense in pretty much any other job in America. It’s crazy that the bar to fire a cop is set at prove they did a hate crime.
Because of their union. Yet they want no one else to have one.
It’s the LAPD I’d be shocked if the union contract didn’t protect against dismissal over hate speech
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.
You don’t have to witness someone breaking an actual law to enact whistleblower protections, it can cover you when you reasonably believe there is “evidence of a violation of any law, rule, or regulation; gross mismanagement; a gross waste of funds; an abuse of authority; or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.”
So yes, this is precisely why whistleblower protections exist.
whistleblower protections don’t allow you to break the law in order to gather evidence in any way that you may see fit. so it’s still illegal to record your co-workers without their knowledge even if they are being racist.
so no, this isn’t what whistleblower protections cover at all, which is why this person is still being charged. I hope that clears it up for you.
But it sounds like they do allow you to record your coworkers if they’re breaking a rule such as being grossly offensive about their colleagues…
don’t allow you to break the law in order to gather evidence in any way that you may see fit. so it’s still illegal to record your co-workers without their knowledge even if they are being racist.
Police officers do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy while on the job.
which is why this person is still being charged.
Being charged does not mean you have committed a crime.
Police officers do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy while on the job.
ok, so now you have abandoned your argument that this person should be afforded whistleblower protections for breaking the law and now you are arguing that they didn’t break the law?
you are wrong either way. becoming a police officer doesn’t automatically sacrifice ones ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’.
like so many of the other redditors you’re confusing how you feel the world should work with how it actually does. you can argue with me forever but you are objectively wrong about this.
Unfortunately US two party laws were made as a knee-jerk reaction to Nixon’s wiretapping; the US doesn’t deal in “expectations of privacy” like more sensible countries do.
Making an audio recording should be no different to getting out a pen and paper and making a written recording. Keeping a personal record should not be a crime. It’s what you do with the recording that matters.
But that’s how things should be, the law is often not right in this area. As others have said, the whistleblower broke the law here.
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
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.
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.
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.
ACAB
In this case, the one cop was very specifically not being a bastard. As much as we need to keep calling out shitty behavior, we also need to reinforce good behavior.
That’s why he won’t be a cop anymore.
One of the good criminals!
Before anyone says something, I don’t believe crime is necessarily a bad thing. Its just against the law. Laws and/or their applications aren’t always good or just.
While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
—Eugene Debs
If the law were inherently right, we would neither have nor need a facility for changing it.
And who do you propose should enforce the no raping and murdering laws?
What do you think I said to be asking me this?
They barely enforce those, considering how rare it is to prosecute rape and how low the solve rate for murders in a lot of states is. If you’re murdered you have slightly better than a coin toss odds of having it solved in the US, and if you’ve been raped the odds of your rapist actually being found guilty are closer to 1%. Partly due to massive rape kit backlogs, partly due to victim blaming from cops leading to victims no longer cooperating.
So yeah, that’s a good question, because the answer doesn’t seem to be ‘the police.’
So fix the police. You need someone to do the job.
POSIWID. If policing was a workable solution it would have worked by now. It’s not like ‘reform the police’ is a thought someone had yesterday, people have poured countless hours of advocacy and passing laws into just that. And yet the problem still remains: cops are sources of violence in communities, just like the criminals they’re allegedly protecting everyone from. I don’t think calling one gang the good guys and the other the bad guys is a realistic way to solve the social problems that lead to crime.
Considering only 25 per 1000 rapists get sentenced to prison, and only ~50% of murderers are found, with only ~70% of those found being convicted (that’s about 350 per 1,000), cops are already doing fuckall about the rapists and murderers.
Perhaps you should be answering your own question considering the current system in place flat out doesn’t fucking work
Read through my comments to the other guy. Already gone through this.
I did. You’re really good at making strawmen and bootlicking and the other guy’s really good at dodging questions. The question of what to do to ensure safe communities without police has thousands of valid answers that countless academics and activists have tirelessly worked on for decades.
Some of my favorites are voluntary community defense that are composed of people that actually live in the neigborhoods they’re protecting, held directly accountable by the community, with positions easily revoked by that same community. Unarmed mental health crisis response teams composed of social workers and community paramedicine practitioners.
And the elephant in the room: abolishing capitalism, patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and all other hierarchical power structures that create the conditions for “crime” to exist in the first place. Your ideas around crime and police are undergirded by a tangled web of assumptions, cultural conditioning, biases, and unanalyzed prejudice. If you actually give a shit and aren’t just arguing on the Internet for shits and giggles, you should do some reading on the matter. Here’s a starting point specifically around police abolition.
This article directly addresses your strawman of “what about the rapists and murderers?” and it’s one of my personal favorites on the topic
They are reinforcing shitty behavior by charging the cop who reported the shitty behaviour.
This is exactly why ACAB, any who aren’t are punished for it until they fall in line or leave the force.
K… I mean KKK.