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.”
recording your coworkers joking that someone died from eating too many tacos isn’t really a case of whistleblowing because saying racist stuff isn’t illegal. so this isn’t precisely why whistleblowing laws exist at all.
You don’t have to witness someone breaking an actual law to enact whistleblower protections, it can cover you when you reasonably believe there is “evidence of a violation of any law, rule, or regulation; gross mismanagement; a gross waste of funds; an abuse of authority; or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.”
So yes, this is precisely why whistleblower protections exist.
whistleblower protections don’t allow you to break the law in order to gather evidence in any way that you may see fit. so it’s still illegal to record your co-workers without their knowledge even if they are being racist.
so no, this isn’t what whistleblower protections cover at all, which is why this person is still being charged. I hope that clears it up for you.
But it sounds like they do allow you to record your coworkers if they’re breaking a rule such as being grossly offensive about their colleagues…
Police officers do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy while on the job.
Being charged does not mean you have committed a crime.
ok, so now you have abandoned your argument that this person should be afforded whistleblower protections for breaking the law and now you are arguing that they didn’t break the law?
you are wrong either way. becoming a police officer doesn’t automatically sacrifice ones ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’.
like so many of the other redditors you’re confusing how you feel the world should work with how it actually does. you can argue with me forever but you are objectively wrong about this.
Wut? When did I claim that? My original claim was that a person didn’t have to witness someone breaking a law to claim whistleblower protections. It can be utilized for something as small as witnessing misconduct.
They do while they are on duty as a police officer… They still have a expectation of privacy as when acting as a private citizen.
Think youight be projecting here…
Unfortunately US two party laws were made as a knee-jerk reaction to Nixon’s wiretapping; the US doesn’t deal in “expectations of privacy” like more sensible countries do.
Making an audio recording should be no different to getting out a pen and paper and making a written recording. Keeping a personal record should not be a crime. It’s what you do with the recording that matters.
But that’s how things should be, the law is often not right in this area. As others have said, the whistleblower broke the law here.
That’s going to be decided by the judicial system. It’s perfectly legal to record officers while they are on duty. The debate will be whether being on the clock and in a police station is the same as operating in their official capacity. Which I think is a pretty easy argument to make in court.
Absolutely. Like I’ve hinted at, the US is kind of unique in this black and white one party/two party consent structure. Other countries deal in “expectations of privacy”, which is far more nuanced, and dare I say it, more sensible.
It’s legal for a member of the public to record an officer on duty. There is a question of whether they are considered on duty (sounds like maybe? It was senior officers formally training other officers, not some private locker room conversation) and also whether an officer can record another. It’s perhaps a different legal dynamic between a member of the public and an officer, vs two officers.
How it plays out depends on the law. Like you say, he has a strong argument against a criminal conviction - and he shouldn’t really be convicted of any crime either. But it does sound like he broke the letter of the law in that jurisdiction.
I think people in positions of power should not be racist fuckwits making light of rape, but fuck me, right?
The bigger issue there is the implication that they themselves commit rapes on vulnerable people.