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.”
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