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.”
In the modern world, I really don’t think you are going to be able to get away from having a professional police force, at least in the major cities. There’s simply far too many people. Maybe a better situation looks somewhat like how firefighters are. Part time officers who just respond as needed in small communities, and you only have the full time forces in major cities. Even that gets hard, based solely on how much easier mobility has become relevant to the past.
At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s any one set of things to can do to make it perfect. There’s a whole lot of smaller things to do to improve it, but I think the most important part will have to be much stronger oversight, and actual punishments for when one inevitably steps out of line.