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| Photo courtesy of LAPD
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A police watchdog group announced Thursday it filed a public records lawsuit claiming the Los Angeles Police Department has deleted personnel rosters from the city’s official website.
The Stop LAPD Spying Coalition claims the city of Los Angeles deleted LAPD personnel rosters to transform the department into a “secret police” to appease the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a union which represents LAPD officers, and has “called for the identity of all police officers to be secret.”
Ivor Pine, representative for the City Attorney’s Office, which represents the police department, said in an email that they had “no comment.”
According to the coalition, in April members of the group observed several examples of LAPD deleting rosters of officers from the official city website. Some of these rosters were able to be downloaded for more than three years, until they were removed.
The coalition in a statement said after it filed a request for those deleted rosters, LAPD claimed they were secret.
“LAPD’s claim that records they put online for years are suddenly secret is an escalation of their efforts to become a fully secret police force,” said Shakeer Rahman, legal counsel for the coalition. “The reason LAPD has become so brazen about violating public records laws is that both the mayor and City Attorney have made clear that they will coddle any police demands for secrecy, no matter the cost.”
In March, the coalition previously sued the city for “censoring basic information about LAPD officers on personnel rosters.” The group using that information then launched the Watch the Watchers website, where the public can search or browse LAPD officer’s based on their photographs, division, rank and other official information.
The following month, the city filed a lawsuit against the coalition and local journalist Ben Camacho, who works for Knock LA, in an attempt to claw back LAPD records the city had released to them under the California Public Records Act.
In two separate rulings, the LA Superior Court denied the city’s lawsuits citing the city did not have sufficient evidence supporting that the records should be protected and kept from the public.
“LAPD is continuing its long history of deleting personnel records to hide them from the public,” said Matyos Kidane, a community organizer with the coalition. “In the 1970s, LAPD and the city attorney collaborated to shred four tons of citizen complaints against to circumvent a California Supreme Court Ruling that required police to disclose those records.”
This case is the eighth public records lawsuit the coalition has filed against the city, the coalition said in a statement.
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