Piled on top of this is mindless, harmful rhetoric steadily flowing from the mouths of Donald Trump, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, DHS head Kristi Noem, and pretty much every elected Republican in DC.
None of this mixes well. The GOP seems to desire martial law. Los Angeles residents just want ICE to leave. The LAPD and LASD seemed to have a handle on this before the interlopers arrived, even if they — like seemingly every police force in the nation — are better at picking fights than de-escalating conflict.
The current LAPD chief has already issued a statement that said the deployment of military units was unnecessary at best, and possibly dangerous at worst, given the lack of communication from the federal government. Meanwhile, the Guardsmen who have already been sent to LA are sleeping on floors and going without pay because, with this administration, it’s action first and logistics last.
I was an officer during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when federal troops were last deployed to our streets. I witnessed the confusion and the risks created by sending soldiers trained for combat into a civilian environment. Even basic commands like “cover me” were misunderstood — interpreted by troops as calls for gunfire rather than tactical positioning. Whereas police officers are taught to use time, distance and de-escalation, soldiers are trained to apply overwhelming force.
We can argue about what officers are actually being taught, as well as what teachings they choose to deploy, but we can’t argue the fact that military mindsets are different than law enforcement mindsets, even though those lines have become increasingly blurred over the past couple of decades.
What’s impossible to ignore are the facts on the ground: Los Angeles is not overwhelmed by violent protests. What there is of that is relegated to an extremely small subsection of the city. Given that fact, it’s completely possible for local law enforcement to manage protests on their own.
There is no question that serious unrest and violence have occurred in parts of downtown Los Angeles. Attacks on buildings and threats to public safety must be taken seriously. But this is not an insurrection. These incidents are localized, and local law enforcement agencies are fully capable of addressing them.
The optics of sending in troops is already bad enough. And the Trump Administration has already had its commandeering of local National Guard troops blocked by a federal court. What’s happening here appears to be illegal, and the Trump Administration is openly daring courts to stop its steady march towards a fascism and martial law.
The outcome of this envelope-pushing will have a very human cost. The administration is playing with people’s lives literally as it tests the boundaries of its power. What happened years ago should be a cautionary tale, but it seems like Trump and his GOP enablers would be more than thrilled with this sort of death toll:
History reminds us of the dangers of blurring these lines. The tragedy at Kent State, where unarmed student protesters were gunned down by National Guard troops, offers a stark warning. The federal government’s deployment of military personnel now risks causing the same escalation, tragic error and lasting damage to public confidence.
Kent State appears to be the blueprint, rather than the barricade. If Californians need to be killed by members of the military so ICE can pack another bus with meaningfully employed migrants, so be it. You’d hope that someone in the administration with the power to push it back from this precipice would speak up. But it’s been five months and it appears every single batshit urge of Trump’s has been waved through like a cargo van full of Afrikaners at the Mexican border.
And despite protests to the contrary by California lawmakers and actual law enforcement officials in the state, this is what we’re seeing happen now: a scene that looks like it’s taking place in a foreign country but is actually nothing more than an untargeted ICE raid of a Los Angeles swap meet:
When I tell you Los Angeles is an occupied city/county, this is what I mean…Yesterday, ICE agents showed up to a regular Saturday swap meet with armed Marines and a military helicopter overhead, like it’s a fucking war zone.
Absolutely chilling. People selling stuff to other people, rudely interrupted by ICE agents and US military members, performing stall-to-stall searches like they’re strolling through an open-air market in Iraq. This is fucked up. And it’s only just beginning.
Throughout the nation, millions gathered peacefully to protest Trump’s military parade. The “No Kings” protests were only interrupted by violent acts of interlopers.
In Los Angeles, the ongoing protests against ICE intermingled with “No Kings” demonstrators. Everything was going fine until the cops decided that they’d have to riot if no one else was going to do it. This isn’t a narrative being pushed by protesters seeking cover for their own violent actions. This is something that was confirmedas it happened by multiple reporters on the scene.
@msnbc.com reporter at the 1:15 mark. “The chaos you’re seeing is not the result of peaceful protestors, it’s the result of actions of law enforcement, specifically the Los Angeles sheriff’s department.” #nokings
Whether this is God showing his sense of humor or karma being the bitch it is doesn’t really matter. The only thing that matters is that it happened, it’s verifiable, and it’s pretty fucking funny.
From the scanner right now: LAPD is taking rubber bullets from LASD. I am not joking. (They're in each other's crossfire, it's a clusterfuck that they've largely brought on themselves)
“Training and expertise.” After escalating things by firing flashbangs, rubber bullets, and tear gas into crowds of people who were, at best, refusing to immediately respond to a dispersal order (although that’s still a point of dispute), the only people engaging in actual violence mainly managed to hurt each other. (That being said, plenty of protesters were still in the middle of this friendly fire exchange, as it appears the LAPD and LASD were both trying to keep separate groups of protesters from joining forces.)
As amusing as that is, it’s still cops instigating conflict, rather than seeking to de-escalate it. And it still means other horrific things happened, like the deliberate shooting of a NY Post reporter by an LA law enforcement officer.
Again, there’s some cruel irony to partake in here, given that the NY Post is firmly pro-cop and has published plenty of cop propaganda while covering anti-ICE protests.
WATCH: ABC News reporter Matt Gutman keeps his cool during live coverage on Los Angeles yesterday after officer snaps at him for reportedly touching him.
I already wrote about the GOP’s bloodthirsty desire to use the military on Americans. They manufactured a nonsense “crisis” by over-aggressively sending in ICE agents to grab people off the streets, leading to protests, which were focused on provoking protestors into violence, which would then be used to justify an even more violent crackdown.
Given that, it’s crucial to get actual reports from what’s actually happening on the street, rather than relying on questionable media framing by those not actually there. Laura Jedeed, at The Nation, reports from the actual protest itself that the only “riot” happening is by the cops looking to provoke a response to justify their initial volley of violent activity:
I spent Sunday from about 4 pm until very late inside the LA protests, and this is what I saw. Yes, cars were set on fire in one part of the sprawling, multi-block protest. Yes, fireworks were launched at cops—a handful, sporadically. But it should be noted that these were launched long after these police officers began unloading flash bang after flash bang, rubber bullet after rubber bullet, into a largely peaceful crowd. (Flash bangs are stun grenades that produce a flash of light and deafening noise.)
The idea that cops were just reacting to protester provocation is absurd. Cops occupied intersections in an attempt to split the protest, then occasionally charged the protest lines that surrounded them to force the crowds to temporarily retreat. These assaults seemed unrelated to protester action or lack thereof. At one point, while the cops were unloading round after round of blue-tipped rubber bullets into a crowd hunkered down behind a barricade, a different group of protesters approached from the side and threw a firework into the center of the police line. The cops turned their fire against the group, which ran off, but did not pursue them. Thirty seconds later, the cops were back to shooting at the barricade.
We have heard a lot about the assault of police officers during these protests. Why haven’t we seen it? Where’s the body cam footage showing protesters injuring cops, striking them, putting them out of commission? I saw a police officer struck by a water bottle thrown by protesters in a barrage launched around 7:30 pm after those protesters spent hours absorbing “less lethal” rounds and being deafened by flash bangs, but that’s about it. Meanwhile, we’ve got drone footage of a mounted officerusing his horse to trample a protester, who lies prone on the ground, surrounded by mounted police. We’ve got cops beating protesters with truncheons, cops deploying tear gas, cops bringing box after box of ammunition to the line so they could fire again and again and again into crowds of protesters exercising tremendous restraint throughout the day.
This pattern—police initiating violence, protesters responding minimally, police escalating further—isn’t accidental. It’s that fascist playbook all over again: manufacture the violence to justify the violence you initiated.
We should all be calling it out for what it is.
Tragically, most of the media are failing at that and are instead accepting the narrative the administration wants. Jadeed details how badly the media is failing:
“Pockets of LA descending into chaos,” an ABC news anchordeclaredin an extremely typical news segment on Monday. “Protesters setting cars on fire, dumping bikes and scooters on police cruisers on the highway. Law enforcement firing hundreds offlash bangsand non-lethal projectiles and making dozens of arrests.” In the background, footage of these atrocities: cops beating protesters with truncheons, tear gas, a car on fire. A shirtless masked man waving a Mexican flag atop a wrecked Waymo, cops firing into a crowd at close range. The only active violence in these clips comes from the cops, but no matter. That fire is what you should be worried about: the fire and nothing else.
While some organizations reported from inside the protest itself, most did not: They set up camp behind the police line, or reported using drone footage, or simply asked the cops what to say. “Dozens of people were arrested Sunday and accused of attempted murder, arson and other crimes during a day of violence and protests in Los Angeles,”NBC Los Angelesdeclared in an article based exclusively on LAPD sources. It’s an understandable decision on their part. Just look at Lauren Tomasi, a reporter for the Australian Channel Nine news service who got “caught in the crossfire” and struck with a rubber bullet while reporting—by which I mean an LA police officeraimed directly at the reporter from close rangeand shot her. She reports being “sore, but OK,” which is more than photographer Nick Stern can say: The day before, a “less lethal” round punctured his leg and requiredemergency surgery. As of Tuesday morning, the LA Press Club documentedover 30 injuries to members of the press. Easier and safer to parrot police talking points than face down their guns.
The systematic targeting of journalists isn’t incidental—it’s designed to control the narrative by ensuring that most coverage comes from behind police lines, where reporters can only see what law enforcement wants them to see.
One of the most egregious examples of this that I saw was the NY Times posting an image of a shopping cart on fire and claiming that “the police are firing back”—as if a burning shopping cart constitutes such a direct threat to heavily armored officers hundreds of yards away that it justifies “returning” fire into crowds of people.
The Trump regime is manufacturing a fake riot to justify their own actions. They’re pushing for violence to justify more violence. The violence and attacks we’re seeing are almost entirely initiated by the cops, and yet are being falsely framed as protesters “rioting” despite the lack of evidence to support it.
The media’s willingness to amplify this manufactured narrative isn’t just journalistic malpractice—it’s complicity in the very authoritarianism they should be exposing.
So let’s be clear about what’s happening. If it’s a riot, it’s the police who are rioting. If there’s an “invasion” of LA, it’s the US military that is invading. Kudos to Jedeed and The Nation for calling this out while so much of the media is rewriting history in real time.
As the driver pointed out—as protesters around me would later point out—the president’s not wrong: LA is under invasion. But the invading force isn’t the immigrants who live and work here. It’s ICE attempting toabduct children from elementary schoolsby claiming their parents authorized the pick-up, or rolling up to Home Depot to abduct people doing the most American thing imaginable: pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, hiring themselves out as day laborers to make a better life for themselves and their families. It’s the Marines deployed against their fellow citizens by an administration that’s fantasized about quelling First Amendment activity by force for half a decade now. These are the un-American hordes descending on Los Angeles.
Trump can call these protests invasions all he wants: I know what I saw. As the sun began to set, riot cops from the LA county sheriff’s department showed up on trucks, fully kitted out with shields and gas masks. The rapidly shrinking protest saw the writing on the wall and, rather than confront these militarized enforcers, turned and walked away, into the night and into the city. For hours they marched, blasting mariachi music and old-school West Coast rap and chanting their simple, reasonable demand: “No ICE in LA!”
As the protesters marched, they chanted something else: “Whose streets? Our streets!” It wasn’t a declaration of war or a challenge to others who might lay claim to the city, but a statement of obvious fact. As these several hundred protesters marched the wrong way up a one-way street, completely stopping traffic, an overwhelming number of drivers honked and cheered. They rolled down their windows to fist-bump the protesters and take pictures and shout their approval.
From the very beginning of this regime, we’ve been saying over and over and over again that the most important thing is telling the truth. As Mike Brock keeps saying, “two plus two equals four” and you can’t let them get away with telling you otherwise.
This isn’t just about getting the facts straight for their own sake. When media coverage systematically misrepresents who is initiating violence and who is responding to it, it provides cover for further escalation. Each cycle of distorted coverage makes the next round of police violence more politically palatable.
The people are not rioting. The police are. Immigrants are not invading. The US military is.
We have to be clear on what ground truth is, and that requires that the media stop accepting propagandist framing.
This is just what I needed to read after a post-election hell week or two. The city of Los Angeles has gone past exhaustion to vindictive irritation after being sued by the same cops it employs because it (legally) handed over photos and names of LAPD officers to journalist Ben Camacho. Ben Camacho then shared those with activist group, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which added those to its searchable database of local law enforcement officers.
At first, the city played ball. It went to bat for the LAPD and claimed Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying had no right to publish the information they’d obtained legally via public records requests. Then the LAPD’s union sued the city, not only claiming the city had no legal right to release this information, but that officers’ lives were being threatened by the publication of this data.
Roughly 900 current officers were contained in the data dump. Dozens of those submitted affidavits to the court in the lawsuit filed by the union claiming they’ve had to do everything from change phone numbers to leave town to avoid the supposed ongoing danger created by the release of this information.
The officers joining the lawsuit also maintained they had a right to remain anonymous while engaging in this lawsuit, which meant the city couldn’t counter specific allegations because its lawyers had no ideas which LAPD officers were making which claims.
After several months, it appears the City of Los Angeles has had it up to here with having its time wasted by anonymous officers, their union reps, and wall-to-wall affidavits filled with unverifiable cop claims.
After arguing for more than a year that hundreds of undercover LAPD officers were at risk because their photos were mistakenly made public, the city of Los Angeles has suddenly reversed course, conceding that most of those involved are not working in the most sensitive police roles.
In a series of court filings last week, city attorneys argued that the roughly 900 officers — whose names have so far been kept secret — don’t have a right to remain anonymous, and asked a judge to order their identities disclosed if their lawsuit against the city is to proceed.
Now, that’s all just mainly procedural so it doesn’t sound much like a city tired of cop bullshit. But later in the article, more detail is added, which definitely makes some implications about the city’s apparent exasperation.
[I]n filings this week, lawyers for the city told the court that although some officers had worked undercover in the past or might wish to do so in the future, “none of these more than 900 Doe Plaintiffs are presently true full-time ‘undercover officers.’”
That undercuts the overly-dramatic submissions from several anonymous officers who claimed their current and future work — if not their lives and the lives of their loved ones — were endangered by the city’s release of this info.
Here’s the real banger: this information had already been made public for severalyears by the LAPD itself.
Assistant city attorney Hector Emilio Corea said in a sworn affidavit that he was part of a team of lawyers and staffers from the city attorney’s office who painstakingly combed through most of the plaintiff officers’ backgrounds.
Corea said photos of many officers involved had already [been made] public on a Facebook page for the LAPD Museum, which published a 2019 yearbook with their names, ranks and assignments.
These yearbooks are now limited to purchasers who can prove they’re police officers, but as the city attorney demonstrated via the Internet Archive, members of the public had been able to purchase these yearbooks as recently as November 2022. Not coincidentally, this move from public to private sales occurred only two months after Ben Camacho obtained these records from the city of Los Angeles.
Truly great stuff. That the city has shifted stances to more closely align with the journalist it sued (but later settled with) because it’s tired of all the bullshit a bunch of anonymous cops are bring to the courts is the perfect blend of irony and poetic justice. Cops like to claim they’re the baddest mfers to ever walk into the valley of the shadow of death, but the moment the public gets on-demand access to their names and positions, they’re suddenly so fearful they have to (allegedly) pull up stakes and/or plead anonymously in court. These cops need to grow up or get out of the business, especially since this is really about accountability and has nearly nothing to do with the publication of info that has already been made public by the LAPD itself.
Some of our nation’s finest Drug Warriors are at it again. And by “at it,” I mean doing seriously stupid, seriously unconstitutional stuff in hopes of finding drugs or (better yet!) cash that will somehow prove they’re doing anything at all to stem the flow of illegal drugs.
And yet, they weren’t even after a truly illegal drug here. The LAPD was going after some supposedly “unlicensed” weed, which means weed that isn’t generating tax dollars, rather than the substance that is mostly legal in a lot of places, including Los Angeles, California.
The owners of NoHo Diagnostic Center are suing the LAPD, the city of Los Angeles and multiple police officers, alleging they violated the business owners’ constitutional rights and demanding an unspecified amount in damages. Officers allegedly raided the diagnostic center, located in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, thinking it was a front for an illegal cannabis cultivation facility, pointing to higher-than-usual energy use and the “distinct odor” of cannabis plants, according to the lawsuit.
Yep, cops on Drug War duty are peeping electric bills to locate grow operations. Even when they’re wrong, they still feel they’re right. There are lots of reasons a place might be using more electricity, whether it’s someone’s desktop Bitcoin rig or, in this case, a place that uses a lot of high-powered, highly-specialized medical equipment. And “distinct odor” is just a useful dodge — something used to justify otherwise illegal entries that can’t be readily disputed because there’s no body cam on the market (yet) that is capable of identifying odors.
What the body cams can catch is the butchery of rights and some incredibly incompetent policing. We’ll see if any of this footage survives — not just because the LAPD might want to cover this up, but because the officers just sort of blundered around the building, poking and prodding at x-ray machines, ultrasound devices, CT scanners, and — most comically — an MRI behind a door that clearly told everyone entering not to bring anything metal into the room. And for good reason, as one officer immediately discovered.
The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine…
An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.
Please tell me more about this “training and expertise,” Officer Disarmed-By-An-MRI-Machine. Also, explain to me why it was worth the sacrifice of a multi-million dollar machine to save a gun that’s far more replaceable than you are, Officer Doesn’t-Know-What-The-Fuck-He’s-Doing. The cop shop will always issue you another one. But without securing a win or a settlement in this lawsuit, the medical facility will have to cover the repairs out of its own pocket due to your inept blundering.
The lawsuit’s [PDF] allegations further highlight the complete ineptitude of everyone involved in this raid, starting with the officer who secured the search warrant. Behold this amazing display of detective work by someone who shouldn’t be allowed to operate MS Word, much less a handgun.
OFFICER FRANCO conducted surveillance on multiple dates in 2023, reporting the “distinct odor of live cannabis plant and not the odor of dried cannabis being smoked,” tinted windows – which he attributed to efforts to conceal cannabis cultivation, security cameras –which he associated with locations where cannabis is grown to prevent theft, and two individuals in similar attire at the premises – whom he concluded were performing maintenance or expanding the cultivation operation.
Pretty hard to square the claim of a pervasive marijuana odor with the distinct lack of marijuana on the premises. And everything Officer Franco claims is illustrative of illegal operations is also illustrative of plenty of fully legal operations — like the operation and housing of incredibly expensive medical equipment by trained professionals.
That’s not all the stupid, though. There’s more from Officer Franco, who couldn’t even be bothered to compare the NoHo Diagnostic Center to its nearest electricity-using neighbors to see if he was actually witnessing something anomalous (and, I guess, drug-related) or just the sort of normal usage split one would expect in a situation like this.
OFFICER FRANCO compared the power usage of the TARGET PREMISES to nearby businesses and found it significantly higher.
OFFICER FRANCO, therefore, concluded that the TARGET PREMISES was cultivating cannabis, disregarding the fact that it is a diagnostic facility utilizing an MRI machine, Xray machine, and other heavy medical equipment—unlike the surrounding businesses selling flowers, chocolates, and childrens’ merchandise, none of which would require significant power usage.
Officer Franco also claimed to have performed an “internet search” linking the lab to “Fouad Ashour,” despite publicly-available business records showing the business had been incorporated in 2021 by its Chief Executive Officer, Ustiana Shaginian.
This isn’t “training and expertise.” It certainly isn’t “expertise.” And if this is how Officer Franco makes inferences, there’s something seriously wrong with the LAPD’s training, as the lawsuit points out. (Emphasis in the original.)
Despite the TARGET PREMISES’ legitimate business certification, OFFICER FRANCO, as a natural next step, contacted LAPD’s Gang and Narcotics Division Cannabis Support Unit. OFFICER FRANCO learned that the TARGET PREMISES, a medical diagnostic center, does not have a license to cultivate cannabis, a finding he promptly labeled a “violation of the California Health and Safety Code.”
Based on his 15 years as an LAPD officer and twelve hours of narcotics training, and based upon the presence of security cameras (typical of any reasonable commercial business), tinted windows (a reasonable practice for any medical facility concerned with patient privacy), high power usage (as any diagnostic facility), the alleged odor of cannabis plants (in a busy shopping plaza with no prior reports), the absence of a cultivation permit (which no diagnostic healthcare facility would possess), and the presence of two men wearing identical company branded shirts (unexpected of individuals involved in illegal cultivation), OFFICER FRANCO found probable cause for cannabis cultivation at the TARGET PREMISES.
Burn him. Burn him to the ground. This wasn’t an investigation. This was an officer working backwards from conclusions he’d apparently generated without any reasonable suspicion that would warrant the initiation of an investigation until he arrived at the point he could get a warrant and start violating rights.
Given these allegations, I would sincerely hope the city of LA already has a check half-written. All it needs now is the settlement amount. Allowing this to move forward just means more cops are going be asked more questions. And the one cop, whose name leads off the lawsuit, has answered plenty of those with actions, and has raised a similar number of disturbing questions whose answers are just going to generate more liability for the PD.
And while it’s always difficult to hold a city or entire police department accountable for officers’ actions, every time these officers attest to their “training” and “experience” in warrant requests, depositions, or direct testimony, they’re implying the errors (or willful violations) they committed were at least partially based on the training provided by their employers and their service to the higher power (the city) that signs their paychecks. This is embarrassing on several levels. Hopefully, NoHo Diagnostic will get some justice here. And even more hopefully, the city will decide to make some heads roll in hopes of deterring future actions like these that not only violate residents’ rights, but insult their intelligence and rob them of their tax dollars.
You would think this is a done deal, but it isn’t. It just keeps getting stupider.
Last year, journalist Ben Camacho filed a public records request for photos of all active Los Angeles PD officers. After a couple of rounds of litigation, the city agreed to release the sought records. Camacho shared these with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which added the photos to its existing searchable database of current LAPD officers.
All (litigation) hell broke loose shortly thereafter. The city sued Camacho, demanding the “return” of the digital files it had given him. LAPD officers sued the city for releasing the photos. The LAPD’s union was also involved in the litigation.
As for Camacho, he’d done nothing wrong. He lawfully acquired the files. And he lawfully shared the files with others. This was confirmed by the settlement paid to Camacho by the city of Los Angeles, which agreed Camacho had obtained these photos legally. And that settlement is part of its defense in the lawsuit filed against by LAPD officers — the admission that a mistake was made by releasing the photos, but it was neither malicious or legally negligent. Furthermore, the city has asserted its own immunity, saying its decision to release this information (whether intentionally or not) is beyond the reach of the officers’ litigation.
Not that it matters to the officers, who still seem to think that if they whine enough, someone will do something about it. Obviously, whatever the result, the publication of the photos has already happened and cannot be undone. So, the officers have decided the best way forward with their litigation is to make a bunch of unverifiable claims about how this publication has endangered them.
Are you guys fans of conclusory statements and vague assertions? Great news! The affidavits being filed by LAPD officers have plenty of both, as the Los Angeles Daily News reports.
“Since the release of my service photo, I avoid public spaces and am very cautious when I am in a public space,” says one such officer identified only as John Doe 137. “I am in constant fear that someone will be able to identify me, follow me home and harm me or my family.”
Doe 138 says he always carries his firearm when he leaves home, even if just to go grocery shopping.
Another officer, John Doe 2, says he was working undercover when at the time of the dissemination of his photo and that his life has changed “forever” as a result.
“Since the release of my personal and private information, I have been forced to alter my social media accounts, change my mailing address and alter my family trust and real estate holdings in order to get back some of the privacy that I have lost,” Doe 2 says.
LOL. What even is this? The first officer seems to believe people are performing searches of the Stop LAPD Spying database and performing citywide searches in person to stalk officers whose photos were made available. Officer Doe 138 is probably just doing what he has always done: going to the grocery store strapped. And the third officer is asserting an extreme overreaction to the publication of a service photo — one that expresses a desire to reclaim “privacy” but says nothing about the presumptive danger of being identified by criminals as an undercover officer.
That’s only part of the stupidity. Another officer claims the release of his photo “affected his mental health” because at some time in the past, he once worked in county jails to elicit confessions from people already imprisoned for other crimes. At no point does this affidavit suggest this is something he is still doing, much less why this release would change anything at all about the danger level since presumably the people he questioned in jail ALREADY KNOW WHAT HE LOOKS LIKE.
It’s all very dramatic and all very useless. As the city has pointed out — something buttressed by its settlement with Ben Camacho — what happened here was unfortunate, but inadvertent. Since it wasn’t deliberate, there’s no cause for action. And even if it was deliberate, the city government’s litigation privilege makes it immune to this lawsuit.
There you have it, aggrieved coppers. Welcome to the reality you rarely have to encounter: the invocation of immunity by someone other than yourselves. Maybe you’ll learn something from the experience. Then again, if regular officers are filing affidavits claiming emotional distress from release of the photos, they’re way off the mark. The only thing the city agrees was “unfortunate but inadvertent” was the release of photos of undercover officers. Any regular officer who performs their duties in public, undisguised, and (most likely) while wearing an LAPD uniform, has zero chance of demonstrating the release of their photo changed the danger matrix of performing their day-to-day job.
Suck it up, self-proclaimed heroes. The affidavits sworn to here only contain fantasies about theoretical danger. If a cop can actually demonstrate a link between the release of these files and any current threats/harassment, they should definitely do so. Given that no one has, this is just a bunch of people whining because one of their extra rights was inadvertently (and momentarily) ignored.
Pretty much any “gang database” is a vehicle for abuse. While there’s some investigative value in maintaining a database of affirmed gang members, most of these data collections are run without oversight or guardrails, allowing officers to add almost anyone they want to the collection, so long as they happen to live, work, or travel through any area these same cops have unilaterally declared to be gang territory.
You’d think a data collection like this would be far more useful if it was carefully curated and regularly pruned to ensure fewer resources were wasted by targeting people who weren’t in gangs but just had the misfortune of being near them from time to time.
But that’s not how law enforcement thinks. Apparently, agencies ranging from local PDs to the NSA still believe quantity is better than quality and do whatever they can to keep the data stores fully stocked. And when it comes to cop shops, it’s always handy to have a reason to harass or arrest someone, even if that “reason” is nothing more than falsified data that’s easily accessible.
Adding all of this together results in ridiculousness, rights violations, lawsuits, and — in this case — criminal charges for the officers who falsely added Los Angeles residents to the LAPD’s gang database. It’s not just a US problem either, despite this nation being home to several extremely large gang databases. An Australian police officer was labeled a gang member simply because he happened to be seen on the same street as two gang members who were passing through the neighborhood.
Closer to home, things get worse and more stupid. The Chicago PD’s gang database has at least 15,000 people who the city’s Inspector General determined to have “no specific gang membership” and “no reason provided” by officers for their inclusion in the database. Boston’s gang database has designated people as gang members for acts as innocent as “wearing Nike shoes” or being beaten up by gang members. The database at issue here — CalGang — has allowed cops to “nominate” literal infants as suspected gang members.
Fortunately, someone decided to start doing something about this abuse. Six months after reports surfaced that LAPD officers were falsely adding residents to the gang database, prosecutors started getting busy. In the end, it was more performative than game-changing. Six officers were hit with criminal charges. Of those six, only one will actually be convicted of a crime.
An officer accused of falsifying records as part of an L.A. Police Department gang-framing scandal pleaded no contest Thursday to six felony counts.
Prosecutors alleged Braxton Shaw falsified dozens of interview cards that police fill out while in the field, labeling as gang members 43 people who had made no such admission or had outright denied affiliation. Some of those people ended up in a state gang database.
The 41-year-old officer entered the plea as part of a deal with prosecutors to resolve multiple felony counts that could have seen him sentenced to decades in prison.
Officer Shaw got hoisted by his own petard — his body cam footage that showed him falsifying gang database reports. The other five officers facing similar charges were at least smart enough to not create permanent video records of their wrongdoing.
Shaw isn’t a scapegoat, though. He’s the sacrificial lamb — the one offered up by the city as evidence it actually cares about overseeing a department that has done little more than wander from scandal to scandal since its inception.
And, while’s it far more than likely that people falsely named as gang members spent some time in lock up (either pre-trial or after pleading guilty to false association charges), Officer Shaw won’t have to spend a day behind bars, despite pleading no contest to multiple charges. As the Los Angeles Times reports, Shaw’s six felony charges will be converted into two year’s probation and 250 hours of community service. The only upside is that Shaw will have to surrender his cop certification, which means he can’t be hired by other law enforcement agencies in California. But that certainly won’t prevent him from plying his corrupted trade elsewhere in the nation after satisfying his probation requirements.
Will this be enough to deter other LAPD officers from adding people to CalGang just because they want to? Oh my no. The state decided to only go after six cops and it only managed to talk one of them into accepting criminal convictions. The LAPD is home to around 9,000 officers. The very eventual punishment of one officer isn’t going to change a thing. Police misconduct remains the heavy favorite going forward.
This is one of the stupidest things ever in terms of public records lawsuits. And that’s saying a lot, considering how often this site has covered public records lawsuits.
This traces back to April of last year. Ben Camacho, a Los Angeles journalist who contributes to sites like Knock LA, sent out a records request for photos of all active LAPD officers. After some early litigation (filed by Camacho), the city agreed to turn over the records. The photos then were placed in a searchable database by activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.
That made LA cops very angry. The police chief demanded the city “prosecute” Camacho for legally obtaining records from the city. The LAPD’s union got in on the action as well, suing the city for releasing the photos and demanding Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying “return” the photos Camacho had lawfully obtained.
That didn’t go anywhere, but the city apparently still felt compelled to oblige the LA police union. It filed a cross motion naming Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying as defendants while simultaneously asking the judge to excuse it from the lawsuit, arguing that it had done nothing wrong.
That’s an insane argument to be making when you’re also arguing the people who received the records you released are somehow doing something wrong. And that probably explains why the city is now buying its way out of one of the lawsuits related to these photos it’s currently engaged in, as Libor Jany reports for the LA Times.
The city of Los Angeles has agreed to pay the legal bills for a local journalist and a group of activists whom it took to court last year for publishing photographs of LAPD officers, part of a tentative settlement that will end a lawsuit some saw as an assault on media freedom.
Under the agreement, which still needs to be approved by the City Council, Knock LA journalist Ben Camacho and the group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition will receive $300,000 for lawyer fees. They were sued for publishing thousands of officers’ pictures that the city had itself provided in response to a public records request.
That’s just the proposal. The defendants still need to agree to it and then a judge needs to wave a gavel above it to make it final. As is almost always the case in lawsuit settlements, Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying will have to agree the city did nothing wrong before being allowed to cash the check.
That likely won’t be a problem for the defendants. After all, the city — as it stated in its own cross-motions in the lawsuit filed against it by the police union — stated it had done nothing wrong by complying with the records request. And the recipients of the legally obtained records likely feel the city didn’t break the law here, either. While they may have some hard feelings about the bogus litigation, they’ll be getting paid for having their time, money, and energy wasted.
But it’s not all over yet. As the LA Times article notes, there’s still plenty of litigation that hasn’t been settled or ruled on, including the union’s lawsuit against the city. That’s the one where the city has tried to convert the recipients of the photos into the defendants, despite the fact the union sued the city over the release of the photos and never bothered to name Camacho or Stop LAPD Spying as defendants.
However, that lawsuit really isn’t Camacho or Stop LAPD Spying’s problem at the moment. The bigger problem might be the LA city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. Seemingly distressed by this inadvertent transparency (and the resulting litigation), Soto is seeking to make things worse for California residents.
Feldstein Soto also began lobbying California lawmakers to weaken the state’s public records law to allow government agencies to decline future public records requests that seek “images or data that may personally identify” employees.
Finally, despite all assertions otherwise, the LAPD and the union suing the city have yet to provide any evidence that any officers’ safety has been threatened or otherwise diminished by the release of these photos. The early claims were that undercover officers would be jeopardized by public dissemination of officer photos. But in the year-plus since the data dump, nothing has come to light showing the publication of the photos did any harm to the LAPD or its officers.
You may recall last month’s hilarious story of lawyer Mike Dunford’s response to a vexatious angry demand letter from IMG, representing the LAPD Foundation, claiming that a t-shirt with the following “Fuck the LAPD” logo violated its IP rights:
The response was as simple as it was direct: Lol, no.
As we highlighted in our post, the threat letter was ridiculously vague about what “IP” the LA Police Department Foundation believed it owned. It’s not difficult to figure out why: because nothing in the image above could possibly constitute either trademarks or copyright belonging to the LAPDF. Still, we had a few paragraphs explaining how if they claimed copyright, it would be wrong and another few paragraphs on why they’d be wrong about trademark too.
It turns out that in addition to the “LOL, no” letter, Dunford also sent a more detailed response to someone higher up at IMG, the rights company that sent the original, basically asking why his client, Cola Corporation (makers of fine anti-police wear), shouldn’t seek attorneys’ fees from IMG for their vexatious takedown.
If you’re wondering why the two separate letters were sent, it’s almost certainly because the first short one was the response. This second, much longer (but still hilarious) one was to basically say “y’all fucked up so bad, that you probably need to pay us for the time you wasted.”
The letter is a rollicking good time, as posted by Cola Corporation on Bluesky:
The second letter that @questauthority.bsky.social sent to LAPD reps on my behalf. Even more savage than “LOL, no.” I’ve highlighted my fave parts. What are yours?
I’ve extracted the letter and PDF’d it, which you can see embedded below.
It’s a hoot, and shows that Dunford is good for more than simply “lol, no” responses.
I write to give you and the thin-skinned bullies you represent an opportunity to provide whatever reason you can think of why my client should not seek to recover attorneys’ fees in this matter under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f) — and, really, to ask you to explain why any of you ever thought any of this was in any way a good idea.
Tell us how you really feel, Mike.
As you know, and I know, and every competent intellectual property lawyer knows, the ‘C’ in DMCA stands for “Copyright.” Unsurprisingly, a valid DMCA takedown therefore requires a valid, good-faith claim of copyright infringement. But you obviously do not have any such claim — or anything that is in the same time zone as such a claim. Neither the LAPDF nor the Los Angeles Police Department itself owns a copyright to the acronym “LAPD.” Nobody does, and nobody can. It is black letter law that individual words and short phrases are not subject to copyright protection. We both know that. Students in Intro to IP classes know that. But as a professional courtesy and on the off chance you somehow forgot, the footnote call at the end of this sentence is a relevant string cite.
I’m going to just post an image of the two footnotes on this page, because, for some reason, the OCR isn’t working great on the PDF copy I made, so I’m retyping all the quotes in this article, and there’s no way I’m retyping all these citations. But, yeah, you get the idea:
If you cannot see it, it’s a long string of recent cases that all highlight the point stated above, and then noting (“wow, that’s a lot of cases saying the same thing from just the last six months, right?). For the sake of brevity, we’re not providing you with a citation from every federal district court to prove the point. We’re pretty sure we could.”
Now, I wasn’t entirely sure that DMCA 512(f) would apply, because looking over the original letter that was sent to Cola Corporation that we posted with the original article, it does not directly purport to be a DMCA takedown. I recognize that “DMCA” has become shorthand for any sort of request for a takedown or any kind of copyright claim, but to be a true DMCA 512 notice for the purpose of demanding a takedown it requires some specific things.
However, as Dunford’s more verbose letter indicates, the guy who sent it, a lawyer named Andrew Schmidt, gave the document the title: “DMCA Takedown Notice – LAPD – The Cola Corporation.” And then emailed it with the subject line “DMCA Takedown notice.” It may be fine (well, not fine, but understandable) for a lay person to use the shorthand of calling something a DMCA notice. But, not a lawyer.
It seems clear that Schmidt was either lazy… or (more likely) was hoping that because “DMCA takedowns” are so widely known as a concept, that simply calling his document as such would lead an unsophisticated individual at Cola Corporation to get scared and fold.
Dunford further makes it clear that the format of the letter “mirrors the requirements” of an official DMCA takedown notice, to effectively argue that even if it wasn’t officially a “DMCA takedown notice,” it was substantially close enough that Cola Corporation might actually have a legitimate 512(f) claim.
Now, if you’ve followed BestNetTech for any length of time, you probably know that DMCA 512(f) claims for filing a misleading DMCA takedown claim are nearly impossible to win for a variety of (mostly stupid) reasons. But, damn, if this weren’t a case where it’s pretty clear that, not only was IMG misrepresenting stuff, but that they knew full well they were misrepresenting stuff. And that means that it’s a situation where a 512(f) claim might actually be legit.
17 U.S.C § 512(f) provides a cause of action to those who are harmed by a knowing material misrepresentation that material was infringing. The representation that “Fuck the LAPD” infringes on the LAPD’s copyrights is clearly false. As noted above, your client owns no copyright relevant to the alleged infringement, because the phrase “LAPD” is not remotely subject to copyright protection. As it is literally impossible to infringe on a copyright that cannot exist, the “DMCA takedown” misrepresented both the ownership and infringement of the copyright. And it did so materially — it affected my client’s response to the purported takedown by leading it to pay me to deal with your blatant bullying.
And, yes, the one area where 512(f) claims most often fall down was whether or not the sender really “knew” it was misrepresenting things. In the Lenz case, famously, the court said as long as the sender subjectively believed the notice was legit, that’s all that’s necessary. But here…
Your company does this type of work professionally. Schmidt is an attorney, senior counsel to your company. Either he knew that there was no conceivable copyright claim here, much less a good faith one, or he is staggeringly incompetent. I would honestly prefer not to believe that IMG knowingly sent a false DMCA takedown to aid and abet a police organization in bullying my client — who was, at the time you sent the document containing the knowing misrepresentations, an unrepresented party — for exercising its First Amendment rights. Yet I simply cannot believe IMG hires attorneys so terrible at their job that IMG was unaware that its client did not have a copyright claim when it sent a DMCA takedown based, in part, on allegations of copyright infringement.
Ouch.
And while the DMCA 512(f) claim is specific to the copyright arguments (the C part, remember), the letter also makes it clear that IMG can’t get away with claiming there was at least good faith in the trademark part. Because there clearly is not.
I could explain why such a claim would fail by methodically working through the eight Sleekcraft factors, but, really, all that would do is waste all of our time. Let’s not pretend: it is inconceivable that a reasonable person, no matter how unobservant or hurried, would be confused into thinking that the Los Angeles Police Department or the Los Angeles Police Department Foundation are the source of “Fuck the LAPD” merchandise.
There’s a fun footnote 7 wedged in that paragraph for law nerds, but I’ll leave that for you to check out on your own.
The next part is just good old-fashioned fun:
That only becomes more obvious when the First Amendment implications of this deplorable incident are examined. The LAPD is to state the obvious a police department. They are an arm of the state. Criticism of the state is protected speech even when it is profane and disrespectful; “speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt.” Snyder v. Phelps, 562 U.S. 443, 458 (2011). That, too, is black-letter law, taught in every law school. The First Amendment acts to ensure that “individual expressions of ideas remain free from governmentally imposed sanctions,” Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46 (1988), it does so when that speech is critical of the government, and it even does so when that speech insults those in power. That’s not just basic law. It’s part of what makes America America.
I’m sure your response to that is going to be something along the lines of “but we don’t actually represent the LAPD, we’re acting on behalf of the LAPD Foundation, which really is different from the LAPD and just wants to protect its economic interests in selling licensed stuff that says “LAPD” on it. But we all know that’s not what this was about. There’s no likelihood of confusion, no infringement of copyright, no conceivable reason to think that people who like the LAPD will stop buying LAPD stuff if they can instead buy a shirt that says “Fuck the LAPD”. This isn’t about the IP. It’s about the LAPD and the LAPD Foundation being thin-skinned bullies who resent the existence of “Fuck the LAPD” merchandise.
Too damn bad.
The LAPD is not expected to like the existence of “Fuck the LAPD” merchandise. But their sole remedy is to not do things that result in people wanting to buy and wear “Fuck the LAPD” merchandise. I understand that would be a difficult task. But I promise you that it would still be easier than trying to get a court to rule that “Fuck the LAPD” shirts violate the LAPDF’s intellectual property rights.
To be honest, when we wrote our original post on BestNetTech about all this, I had wanted to dig in deeper on all of these issues but felt like maybe I was going too hard in response to an issue that really only required “lol, no.”
But I do appreciate that Dunford also was willing to go deep and point out the obvious absurdities here. I eagerly await finding out if IMG ever replied…
We’ve had plenty of posts discussing all manner of behavior from the Los Angeles Police Dept. and/or the LAPD union here at BestNetTech. As you might imagine if you’re a regular reader here, the majority of those posts haven’t exactly involved fawning praise for these supposed crimefighters. In fact, if you went on a reading blitz of those posts, you might even come away thinking, “You know what? Fuck the LAPD!”
Well, if you wanted to display your sentiments while you went about your day, you might go over to the Cola Corporation’s website to buy one particular shirt it had on offer there before they completely sold out.
Now, it’s not uncommon for misguided entities to issue intellectual property threat letters over t-shirts and apparel, even when it is of the sort that is obviously fair use. Given that, you might have thought it would be the Los Angeles Lakers that sent a nastygram to Cola Corp. After all, the logo in question is clearly a parody of the LA Lakers logo.
Nope!
It was the Los Angeles Police Foundation via its IMG representatives. The LAPF is something of a shadow financier of the LAPD for equipment, including all manner of tech and gear. We have no idea how an entertainment agency like IMG got in bed with these assbags, but it was IMG sending the threat letter you can see below, chock full of all kinds of claims to rights that the LAPF absolutely does not and could not have.
If you can’t see that, it’s a letter sent by Andrew Schmidt, who represents himself as the Senior Counsel to IMG Worldwide, saying:
RE: Request to Remove Infringing Material From www.thecolacorporation.com Dear Sir/Madam:
I am writing on behalf of IMG Worldwide, LLC (“IMG”), IMG is the authorized representative of Los Angeles Police Foundation CLAPF) LAPF is one of two exclusive holders of intellectual property rights pertaining to trademarks, copyrights and other licensed indicia for (a) the Los Angeles Police Department Badge; (b) the Los Angeles Police Department Uniform; (c) the LAPD motto “To Protect and Serve”; and (d) the word “LAPD” as an acronym/abbreviation for the Los Angeles Police Department (collectively, the “LAPD IP”). Through extensive advertising, promotion and the substantial sale of a full range of licensed products embodying and pertaining to the LAPD IP, the LAPD IP has become famous throughout the world; and as such, carries immeasurable value to LAPF.
We are writing to you regarding an unauthorized use of the LAPD IP on products being sold on your website, www.thecolacorporation.com (the “Infringing Product”). The website URL and description for the Infringing Product is as follows: https://www.thecolacorporation.com/products fack-the- lupd pos-1&sid=435934961&&variant=48461787234611 FUCK THE LAPD For the avoidance of doubt, the aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith are in no way authorized or approved by LAPF or any of its duly authorized representatives.
This letter hereby serves as a statement that:
The aforementioned Infringing Product and the image associated therewith violate LAPF’s rights in the LAPD IP
These exclusive rights in and to the LAPD IP are being violated by the sale of the Infringing Product on your website at the URL mentioned above;
[Contact info omitted]
On information and belief, the use of the LAPD IP on the Infringing Products is not authorized by LAPF, LAPF’s authorized agents or representatives or the law.
Under penalty of perjury, I hereby state that the above information is accurate and I am duly authorized to act on on behalf of the rights holder of the intellectual. property at issue I hereby request that you remove or disable access the above-mentioned materials and their corresponding URL’s as they appear on your services in as expedient a manner as possible.
So, where to begin? For starters, note how the letter breezily asserts copyright, trademark, and “other licensed indicia” without ever going into detail as to what it thinks it actually holds the rights to? That’s an “indicia” of a legal threat that is bloviating, with nothing to back it up. If you know what rights you have, you clearly state them. This letter does not.
If it’s a copyright play that the LAPF is trying to make, it’s going to go absolutely nowhere. The use is made for the purposes of parody and political commentary. It’s clearly fair use, and there are plenty of precedents to back that up. Second, what exactly is the copyright claim here? It’s not the logo. Again, if anything, that would be the Lakers’ claim to make. The only thing possibly related to the LAPD would be those letters: LAPD. And, no, the LAPD does not get to copyright the letters LAPD.
If it’s a trademark play instead, well, that might actually work even less for the LAPF, for any number of reasons. Again, this is parody and political commentary: both First Amendment rights that trump trademarks. More importantly, in trademark you have the question of the likelihood of confusion. We’re fairly sure the LAPF doesn’t want to make the case that the public would be confused into thinking that the Los Angeles Police Foundation was an organization that is putting out a “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirt. Finally, for there to be a trademark, there has to be a use in commerce. Is the LAPF selling “Fuck the LAPD” t-shirts? Doubtful.
But that’s all sort of besides the point, because the LAPF doesn’t have the rights IMG asserted in its letter. Again, the only possible claim that the LAPF can make here is that it has ownership to the letters LAPD. And it does not. Beyond the fact that it had no “creative” input into LAPD, the LAPD is a city’s law enforcement agency and you cannot copyright or trademark such a thing. And, as we’ve discussed multiple times in the past, government agencies don’t get to claim IP on their agency names. The only restrictions they can present are on deceptive uses of logos/seals/etc.
So, what is actually happening here is that the LAPF/LAPD (via IMG) is pretending it has the right to screw with private citizens in ways it absolutely does not, and is using those false rights to harass those private persons with threatening behavior to intimidate them into doing what the LAPF wants. Which, if I’m being totally honest here, is certainly on brand as roughly the most police-y thing it could do in response to a simple t-shirt that is no longer even for sale.
Now, you might imagine that the Cola Corporation’s own legal team would reply to the silly threat letter outlining all of the above, crafting a careful and articulate narrative responding to all the points raised by the LAPF, and ensuring that their full legal skills were on display.
Instead, the company brought on former BestNetTech podcast guest, lawyer Mike Dunford, who crafted something that is ultimately even better.
If you can’t read that, you’re not missing much. It says:
Andrew,
Lol, no.
Sincerely, Mike Dunford
Perfect. No notes. May it go down in history alongside Arkell v. Pressdam, or the infamous Cleveland Browns response to a fan complaining about paper airplanes, as the perfect way to respond to absolutely ridiculous legal threat letters.
For what it’s worth, Dunford’s boss, Akiva Cohen, noted that this letter was “a fun one to edit.” We can only imagine.
