What is this?

This website is maintained by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community group based in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles.

Around a decade ago, Stop LAPD Spying developed a copwatch practice that we call Watch the Watchers. Copwatch refers to the practice of community members teaming up to observe and document police abuses, especially arrests and other violence. Watch the Watchers built on this practice with a focus on surveillance technologies and patterns. You can watch videos explaining our Watch the Watchers work at May Day actions in MacArthur Park in 2015, where we exposed LAPD undercover surveillance, and in 2017, where LAPD officers tried to lie about spy technologies deployed to monitor the crowd.

This website is intended as a tool to empower community members engaged in copwatch and other countersurveillance practices. You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community. The website’s ease of use also makes it a political statement, flipping the direction of surveillance against the state’s agents. Police have vast information about all of us at their fingertips, yet they move in secrecy.

Where is the data from?

All data on this website is drawn from public records released by city agencies. You can read more about Stop LAPD Spying’s work with public records in a zine we published in 2022, Know Your Fights: Using Public Records Laws in Abolitionist Organizing.

The project first began after we obtained a full roster of all LAPD personnel along with headshot photographs of every officer that LAPD had released in response to a public records request. LAPD regularly uses photos like this on its website and in propaganda materials, but they denied the public records request claiming that none of these photographs exist in a digitized format, so an LAPD unit “whose primary responsibility is to provide evidentiary photography” would need “to take affirmative steps to manually locate the negatives and produce photos.” LAPD claimed that this would be “unduly burdensome.”

That was a lie, and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition provided legal support to address the issue. We helped file a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles exposing that these photos were readily available and a matter of public record. In response to the lawsuit, LAPD turned over more than 9,000 headshot photographs. We then filed additional Public Records Act requests and lawsuits to both LAPD and the City Controller to obtain further details on every officer.

Is this data private? Didn't the city sue you to censor it?

All of the information on this website comes from records that were deliberately made public by the City of Los Angeles in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits. That means all of this information belongs to the public and is a matter of public record. But within days of us launching this website, police began a misinformation campaign to claim that we were violating officers' privacy and putting them in danger. Police are so accustomed to getting everything they want and to making themselves look like victims that politicians and the press lined up behind the false police narrative.

The campaign to demonize and discredit us soon escalated to litigation. The Los Police Protective League, a policy lobby group, filed a lawsuit against the city and police chief demanding that they take legal action against us to shut down the website. In turn, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto filed a lawsuit against us and the journalist who first obtained the photographs, demanding that we all censor these records from the internet. The court promptly rejected their request. The city eventually dismissed their lawsuit and agreed to pay $300,000 in attorney fees to the attorneys who defended us and the journalist.

That was one of two lawsuits the city filed against us. The second lawsuit was a cross-complaint the city filed in a case initiated by over 9,000 anonymous individuals who claim that they are each secret police officers and that this website caused them both physical pain and emotional suffering. We have no idea who these people are, and we believe the case is a scam to defraud the public. The city's cross-claims against us sought to make us pay potentially millions of dollars in damages to those officers. We promptly filed to dismiss the claims against us, and the court granted our motion. The court held that the public has a First Amendment right to publish all of this information.

Despite courts throwing out the city's frivolous lawsuits against us, the fight continues. Since early 2023, LAPD has largely stopped complying with requests for officer rosters and other information. We have been fighting that in at least five lawsuits that we filed against the City of Los Angeles between March 2023 and August 2024. In addition, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto has been lobbying for legislators to amend the public records act to make secret any "data that may personally identify" a police officer. This proposal would shroud all of California's police agencies in secrecy, blocking any requests for information that names or otherwise identifies an officer. It would turn every law enforcement agency in the state into a secret police force. So far we have succeeded in blocking this dangerous and repressive proposal, but the City Attorney is likely to keep trying, especially as she courts more donations from the City Attorney.

How reliable is the data?

Again, all the data used to build this website is drawn from city records, so we can only vouch for it up to that extent. The data is only accurate as of the date we received it from a city agency, and it's possible that either LAPD or an officer provided inaccurate or incomplete data. The bottom of each officer's profile page includes detailed disclaimers explaining when we received the information and how or why it might be inaccurate. For example, because police move frequently between divisions/bureau and some might have multiple division/bureau assignments, the our information is likely to out of date.

We plan to keep refreshing this data from new public records requests as well as to add other data.

If there's anything you think we should add to this website or if you want to contribute any data or work to the effort, we would love to hear. Stop by one of our meetings or email stoplapdspying@gmail.com.

Who is funding this?

Our work is funded largely through community donations. If you find this website useful or inspirational and you want to support our work financially, please donate.