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.”
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.