The city released 9,310 Los Angeles Police Department headshots to a journalist. Six months later, it’s suing to get them back.
April 11 2023, 5:30 p.m.
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.
“This lawsuit is a political stunt. It’s a desperation play,” Loy said. “And as a practical matter, there’s nothing a court can do. You cannot scrub the internet of everything.”
“This lawsuit is a political stunt. It’s a desperation play.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a private police union that lobbies on behalf of LAPD officers, has launched its own lawsuit against the city and the LAPD for releasing the records, and 321 allegedly undercover LAPD officers announced their intention to file a separate class-action suit seeking damages for negligence.
Camacho believes that the city is attempting to “save face on the other front that they’re fighting with the police union.” He told The Intercept that he sees the lawsuit against him as “intimidation and scapegoating.” In addition to demanding that he “give everything back and delete copies,” Camacho said, the lawsuit insisted that he “never, ever share these photos ever again. That’s a huge violation of my First Amendment freedom of the press.”
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.
“While there is strong public interest in governmental transparency, there is equally strong interest in the safety of LAPD officers, especially those in sensitive and undercover assignments,” a spokesperson for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office wrote in an email to The Intercept. “That is why we brought this suit — to have the photos of officers immediately removed from the website and to have the flash drive containing them returned.” LAPD’s media relations division declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation. The police union did not respond to a request for comment.
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.
Camacho is an LA-based journalist and filmmaker who writes for the local nonprofit newsroom Knock LA. Last year, he published a detailed investigation into a group of Santa Ana police officers who received numerous complaints without facing any discipline — and who all shared gang-like skull tattoos. In one incident, five off-duty members of this police gang allegedly harassed two 15-year-old girls at a restaurant, one of whom said she was sexually assaulted. Camacho’s reporting relied in part on Santa Ana police officer headshots, which he had obtained through a California Public Records Act request.
In October 2021, Camacho filed a similar request to the LAPD. According to the lawsuit Camacho later filed against Los Angeles, the city initially refused to hand over the headshots, claiming that the department did not have any responsive records. LAPD further claimed that it didn’t possess any headshots in digital format and that locating the “negatives” would be “unduly burdensome.”
Camacho’s Public Records Act lawsuit argued that LAPD’s response was “utterly implausible” because the police department regularly published headshots of its officers in its own promotional material. Camacho pointed to headshots of LAPD command staff on the department’s website and headshots of officers published on Facebook and Twitter.
In the resulting settlement, the city agreed to hand over photos of all LAPD officers except for those who worked undercover. The city’s attorney estimated that fewer than 100 officers were working undercover and would be excluded from the release, according to an email Camacho published on Twitter.
