After uproar, LAPD officer avoids criminal charges for exposing cops’ racist chatter

Filed 1w ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Quirky Dog

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Conrad Poirier · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced he is dropping felony charges against LAPD officer Daniel Flores, reducing them to misdemeanors and opening the door to diversion that could wipe the case entirely.

Flores had secretly recorded 122 conversations in which colleagues allegedly called Black people 'monkeys,' female officers 'bitches,' and used the word 'rapeable.' He was initially charged with 16 felonies, one per officer recorded, under California's all-party consent law.

Two weeks before reversing himself, Hochman filed a 27-page motion accusing Flores of editing tapes and acting for financial gain, comparing whistleblowing favorably to an officer 'planting drugs.' At Wednesday's press conference he admitted the message 'was somewhat being lost in the media and the community' and that his office had 'been listening to feedback.'

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Nothing focuses a prosecutor's mind like the discovery that the public can read. The charges did not shrink because the facts changed; they shrank because the arithmetic of embarrassment finally exceeded the arithmetic of sixteen felonies, and a man who two weeks ago likened a tape recorder to planting evidence now presents himself as a careful student of community feedback. If “listening” means waiting until the room turns and then calling the U-turn a virtue, every institution in the county is an excellent listener.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Quirky Dog · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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