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.”
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.
—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.
When cops violate the law the prosecutor on that case is still the same local prosecutor that needs the cops to cooperate to make all her other cases. We don’t have a federal department running very easy undercover operations where they test the police behavior during stops and arrests. Police unions are the only unions that republicans actually support.
There is very low hanging fruit that we’ve never fixed.
“We haven’t found a perfect solution yet, so fuck it, let’s just make rape legal”
Wow, when I reread my comment, that is what I said! Excellent reading comprehension and not at all a strawman!
If firefighters went around regularly starting fires when they got called out to a house you wouldn’t be half a hesitant about calling the profession a problem.
I said fix the police, you said they are not fixable. That only leaves two paths forward: status quo or get rid of law enforcement. Laws that are unenforced leave the actions de facto legal.
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