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.”
They barely enforce those, considering how rare it is to prosecute rape and how low the solve rate for murders in a lot of states is. If you’re murdered you have slightly better than a coin toss odds of having it solved in the US, and if you’ve been raped the odds of your rapist actually being found guilty are closer to 1%. Partly due to massive rape kit backlogs, partly due to victim blaming from cops leading to victims no longer cooperating.
So yeah, that’s a good question, because the answer doesn’t seem to be ‘the police.’
So fix the police. You need someone to do the job.
POSIWID. If policing was a workable solution it would have worked by now. It’s not like ‘reform the police’ is a thought someone had yesterday, people have poured countless hours of advocacy and passing laws into just that. And yet the problem still remains: cops are sources of violence in communities, just like the criminals they’re allegedly protecting everyone from. I don’t think calling one gang the good guys and the other the bad guys is a realistic way to solve the social problems that lead to crime.
When cops violate the law the prosecutor on that case is still the same local prosecutor that needs the cops to cooperate to make all her other cases. We don’t have a federal department running very easy undercover operations where they test the police behavior during stops and arrests. Police unions are the only unions that republicans actually support.
There is very low hanging fruit that we’ve never fixed.
“We haven’t found a perfect solution yet, so fuck it, let’s just make rape legal”
Wow, when I reread my comment, that is what I said! Excellent reading comprehension and not at all a strawman!
If firefighters went around regularly starting fires when they got called out to a house you wouldn’t be half a hesitant about calling the profession a problem.
I said fix the police, you said they are not fixable. That only leaves two paths forward: status quo or get rid of law enforcement. Laws that are unenforced leave the actions de facto legal.
False dichotomy
What third option is there? If we accept the premise that there’s a problem with policing, you are left with four broad categories of what happens going forwards:
A) fix policing
B) leave it as is
C) get rid of it
D) make it worse
D is obviously what nobody wants, A is what the other guy said is impossible, so that only leaves B and C.
Replace it with a better alternative.
Is your daddy a cop or are you irresistibly drawn to defending the status quo? Struggling to think of other reasons to refuse to engage with anything I said other than ‘you said no cops, you want to legalize rape!’
Now that I think about it, maybe you just aren’t understanding how broad of a category “fix the police” is.
“Execute all existing cops and start again with a completely different set of people with a completely different set of rules” is an idea that would fall under the umbrella of “fix the police”.
The reason that laws truely exist is because there’s someone to enforce them. “Police” is just the term used for whoever is doing that enforcement, whatever form it takes.
Don’t get too hung up on the rape part. I just used that as an example of a law that we can all agree needs to exist. If I said “theft”, there would be the added complication of whether or not that law should even exist in the first place.
Is there any reason to believe that doing any of that would actually fix the problems in policing? It’s like saying the problem with the American colonies was that they didn’t have the right king ruling over them. The problem is that people given power over other people are eventually going to abuse it.
Historically, some societies dealt with this by not having police at all (and I’m not talking tribes of 20 people, I’m talking tens of thousands of people) and having strong social networks to protect each other. That along with freedom of movement allowed people to seek out new communities or spend time away from the source of the conflict. Others had ‘police’ that could only use force on others during specific periods of time and rotated between different groups so that no one group held too much power. But this is closer to jury duty than anything that people would recognize as modern policing, and just like today there isn’t a guy who’s a professional juror who makes his living off voting on peoples’ innocence or guilt (and occasionally gets caught taking bribes), in these societies there wasn’t a type of guy that was a cop because the idea of it being your job to hurt people and force them to obey someone was considered abhorrent. If you want to read more about this it’s not directly about policing, but I recommend ‘The Dawn of Everything’ by Matt Graeber and David Wengrow.
The status quo sure as fuck isn’t “fix it”.
The status quo is literally ‘fix it.’ You are repeating what Democrats have been saying for the past decade and acting like it’s revolutionary thought.