FBI Joins Investigation Of LAPD Gang Unit Officers Who Did Their Own Selective Editing Of Body Cam Recordings (original) (raw)

from the we-control-the-horizontal dept

If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, right? That’s what law enforcement and surveillance agencies tell us, coaxing us into letting our guard down so they can dig into our stuff without worrying about little things like probable cause.

Cops like to do their work without creating narratives they can’t challenge. Hence the resistance to recording devices, despite the fact body cameras remain far more useful to prosecutors than to members of the public demanding better police accountability.

The Los Angeles Police Department is host to myriad problems. Among those many problems are its officers. Los Angeles is home to a number of gangs. It’s also home to a number of officers who believe the best way to police the gang problem is to generate junk data (which is then fed to its crime fighting AI) and engage in bogus enforcement activity.

One of the generally accepted methods of handling gang crime is allowing officers to call pretty much anyone they run into a “gang member.” On top of that, there’s the LAPD’s “gang unit,” which is supposed to be composed of officers with specific skills that allow them to more effectively grapple with the city’s gang problem.

Instead, it appears “gang unit” is a name that generates the wrong connotation. Instead of insinuating these are gang-focused crime fighters, the name could be read to mean the “unit” is just another “gang” (like those so common in the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department) that thinks fighting crime means being aggressive, violent, and unwilling to comply with PD rules.

And that’s how cops become suspects, as the Los Angeles Times reported last week.

Several members of an LAPD gang unit that is often responsible for serving warrants on suspected criminals recently found themselves on the other side of the equation — as subjects of search warrants that allowed the department’s internal affairs investigators to take the rare step of inspecting their lockers.

The precise nature of the allegations against officers remains unclear, but, according to multiple sources who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation, some of those targeted by the search warrants were found to have routinely switched off their body cameras during traffic stops.

Come for the locker searches. Stay for the last sentence. “Routinely switched off their body cameras.”

Policies say this isn’t allowed. These cops don’t care. And, up until now, their refusal to comply with body camera policy hasn’t affected their jobs.

But now it is. And for good reason. If you’re doing your job right, you won’t care that it’s being documented by the narc pinned to your chest. But if you’re doing it wrong, you’ll want to make sure the eye blinks when told to in order to deliver the narrative that supports whatever violations you’ve just engaged in.

While officers may decide they have nothing to fear from internal investigations performed by people most cops consider to be traitors (read: Internal Affairs), these gang unit officers are now up against an agency that doesn’t care what LAPD gang unit members think of it.

The FBI has joined a widening investigation into a Los Angeles Police Department gang unit whose members are accused of routinely failing to document their actions during traffic stops, an alleged pattern of deception that Mayor Karen Bass called “very disturbing.”

Sure, the FBI has its own problems that it won’t fix, but its involvement here means the LAPD can’t continue to ignore selective on-the-fly-editing of body cam footage by gang unit members. Instead, it will have to face whatever’s uncovered by the FBI, which has the power to force the LAPD to hand over data and documents it would never hand over voluntarily to anyone else, including its own in-house “oversight.”

The investigation was triggered by a complaint from a driver who claimed he and his car were unconstitutionally searched. But before this could be swept under the rug and/or dismissed as the rantings of a person who didn’t enjoy their last interaction with LAPD officers, enough was discovered that locker searches were ordered and the FBI invited into the fold.

Two gang unit officers were found to have “not properly documented the detention, or their actions.” By switching off their cameras until they moved forward with an arrest, the officers obscured the events that led to this action. And that discovery led to more discoveries: the two officers involved were found to have done this on multiple occasions, allowing their body cameras to record only what the officers wanted them to record.

Two officers may not seem like much given the number of officers the LAPD employees. But if two officers felt comfortable doing this, it would be insane to believe these were the only two officers who felt OK with editing the permanent record on the fly. Hence the IA investigation. And hence the likely more effective FBI investigation.

Tip of the iceberg, as they say. There will be more to come. The rules have changed for the LAPD and its gang unit. But that doesn’t mean officer behavior has been altered.

According to an LAPD online dashboard, the Mission gang unit is among the most active in the city’s 21 police divisions, but nearly 10% of the unit’s traffic stops were considered pretextual, meaning officers used minor traffic violations as a reason to pull over vehicles and search them for evidence of more serious crimes. The data show the Mission‘s has the highest rate of such stops among all of the department’s gang units.

In March 2022, the department tightened its rules on pretextual stops, after years of pressure from police reformists and politicians who argued they disproportionately affect people of color.

You can take the bias out of the policy, but you can’t take the bias out of the officer. The policy alters the contours for pretextual stops. It also mandates officers record the justification for the stop on the body cameras when performing a pretextual stop.

Judging from what’s been revealed so far, we can make an educated guess as to what’s happening. The pretextual stops are continuing in violation of department orders. Covering up this violation of policies means not recording the information department policy mandates. It’s the cop version of asking for forgiveness, rather than asking for permission. And that version means never asking for forgiveness.

A law unto themselves. That’s the gang unit officers caught so far. There will be more. And by the end of it, people will have even less reason to trust cops, nor any reason to believe their primary interests are protecting and serving anyone but themselves.

Filed Under: body cam, fbi, gangs, lapd, police gangs