‘A blunder that is just epic’: LAPD reels after release of undercover identities

The Los Angeles police department has made many mistakes during its tumultuous history, but few may compete with an administrative error its own union officials are calling “a blunder that is just epic”: the inadvertent exposure of dozens of officers working undercover to investigate national security breaches, drug cartels and other dangerous criminal enterprises.

The mistake arose when the city responded to a public records request by releasing the names, photographs and badge numbers of more than 9,000 officers – close to the entire force. The department assured the journalist who had fought and won a legal battle to obtain the records that “images of officers working in an undercover capacity … are not included”.

But that turned out not to be true.

None of the officers – undercover or otherwise – were given advance warning or offered an opportunity to raise objections to their information becoming public. Many of them have reported threats to themselves and their families and have told the police union they are so fearful for their safety they are considering quitting the force.

One source with detailed knowledge of the case, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the information, said about 150 present and former undercover officers had been exposed. That has infuriated the force as a whole and shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the chief, Michel Moore, who was just appointed to a second term despite a slew of controversies surrounding his first five-year tenure and is managing a department that was already understaffed and low on morale.

Soon after the information appeared on an internet database in March, one social media troll issued a call for “clean head shots on these LAPD officers, A to Z”. Law enforcement experts also warn that drug cartels and other powerful criminal gangs are likely to run the photographs through sophisticated facial recognition software to help them root out police moles within their organizations – and, if they get the chance, to take revenge.

“They’ve put officers in harm’s way and potentially stymied anyone from going into undercover work,” a police union spokesperson, Tom Saggau, said. “With the risk of facial recognition now, you’d be out of your mind [to do it].”

The union has lodged a formal complaint to demand accountability from Moore and from his top legal adviser. According to the complaint, the city omitted the names of officers carrying out internal investigations into potential wrongdoing within the police department itself, but somehow failed to omit the names and images of officers working “sensitive investigative assignments” in the field.

The union’s dismay is largely shared by Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, whose plans to mount an aggressive recruitment campaign and hire hundreds of new police officers to make up for losses since the start of the Covid-19 epidemic are now in significant jeopardy. She has called the release an “an egregious mistake” and expressed concern that officer numbers may now drop further.

Some of the complaints coming from the rank and file reflect a general hostility to publicizing personal information – a contentious issue pitting uniformed officers against campaigners for greater transparency and accountability, and not just in Los Angeles.

But the danger to past and present undercover operatives is not in dispute, and Moore has conceded that the information release has already caused problems for some of the department’s most important investigations. Several officers, he told one interviewer, have had to pull out of undercover operations and work their investigations at a safer distance.

While facial recognition software is expensive and unlikely to be used by ordinary street gangs and other low-level criminal enterprises, police experts say it is almost certainly in use by drug cartels and other well-resourced operations. Moore acknowledged that even officers who haven’t worked an undercover assignment in many years could now be at risk and that disguises like facial hair, glasses or hats are not sufficient to fool software that focuses on bone structure, eyes and other facial features.

The debacle is particularly embarrassing at a time when the safety of sensitive government information is a fraught topic across the US, after the leak of hundreds of highly classified military files on the war in Ukraine and the arrest of a young air national guardsman with surprisingly easy access to them.

All parties within the LAPD and the city agree the records release, which was negotiated last summer, should have been subject to much stricter controls and that the affected officers should have been given ample warning.

Beyond that, though, the reaction has largely been defined by acrimony and finger-pointing. Moore, who has a background in records administration, insists he was not told about the release before it happened but has yet to take disciplinary action against the LAPD executives responsible or to explain why they kept him in the dark. He says he is awaiting the outcome of an investigation by the department’s inspector general.

Moore’s cautious response has infuriated the police union, which is demanding that the chief’s top civilian administrator and legal adviser be placed on immediate administrative leave. According to the union, Lizabeth Rhodes, the director of the department’s office of constitutional policing and policy, is ultimately responsible for the leak of sensitive information and has not been fully forthcoming about what she knew and why she did not share her information with either the union or Moore.

The union also says that Moore, whose first term as chief was marked by controversies over his officers’ aggressive handling of street protesters and the reporters covering them, faces what its spokesperson called “a test of leadership he cannot afford to fail”.

Saggau says he and his colleagues have been unimpressed by the response so far. “Since we filed our complaint, we haven’t heard from anybody,” he said. “Usually, we get a phone call. That tells us somebody’s gone to Costco, bought a big broom, and is going to sweep this under the largest rug they can.”

(The LAPD declined an invitation to comment on this or the complaint about Rhodes, citing “pending litigation”.)

The city, meanwhile, has sparked an entirely different firestorm by suing Ben Camacho, the journalist who made the public records request, along with the police accountability group that posted the information online. The suit accuses them of “willfully exposing … the identities of Los Angeles Police Department officers in undercover assignments … knowing that they are not entitled to possess this information” and insists that they return the documents they received.

The suit has been slammed by legal experts as a ham-fisted attempt to blame the media for someone else’s mistake – particularly since the city itself said the information it released omitted the names and identifying details of undercover officers – and seems almost certain to be dismissed.

Lawyers for Camacho, who works for the online news site Knock LA, said the suit was “a thinly veiled attempt to silence Mr Camacho and other journalists who report on law enforcement” and could accomplish nothing since the photographs are now widely available on the internet and cannot be “clawed back”.

The acrimony comes at a bad time for the LAPD, which is about 1,000 officers short of a full force and has struggled for years to fill seats at its police academy. The chief and others acknowledge that many would-be recruits view Los Angeles as a dangerous place to work that offers a lower standard of living than many quieter, more suburban police departments. A number of veteran officers have either quit or taken retirement for a similar reasons.

Bass’s recruitment drive is also likely to come under renewed attack from some of the more progressive members of the LA city council, whoquestion whether the city would be safer with more officers and would prefer to keep numbers where they are and redirect funds to social and mental health services.