Last week, Knock LA journalist Ben Camacho was sued by the City of Los Angeles alongside an activist organization and multiple unnamed “Does,” to prevent them from publishing the names on a roster of Los Angeles Police Department officers.
Problem is, it was the LAPD itself that—apparently unwittingly—provided Camacho with that list and photos of undercover officers after he filed a public records request.
The accidental disclosure prompted the city to ask a court to order Camacho, the activist organization, and the unnamed people to turn over the photos and destroy any copies.
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The lawsuit stems from an October 2021 records request Camacho filed with the LAPD for the names and photos of all active-duty police officers, pursuant to the California Public Records Act. Camacho said he had noticed a pattern in videos of officers concealing their activities from cameras, so he wanted to be able to match up the names with those he observed in future videos.
That request was partially rejected in January 2022, with the city claiming it only possessed the film negatives of each officer’s photo and it would have been “unduly cumbersome” to find and produce each one, according to a record response reviewed by The Daily Beast.
That did not sit well with Camacho, who sued the agency for the records in May. After months of court proceedings, the city settled with Camacho and agreed to provide the records—minus the photos of any undercover officers.
“We were told undercovers will not be included in this release,” Camacho said. “We just continued with that.”
He picked up an envelope with the roster and photos in September and, uneager to be a “gatekeeper of public records,” provided them to the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition—an organization dedicated to “building power toward abolition of the police state,” according to its website—after it asked him for them. The group used the photos to build the website “Watch the Watchers,” which allows anyone to search an LAPD officer by their name or badge number and see their photo.
The website rankled the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the city’s police union, which filed an official complaint with the city last month. It was then that Camacho discovered there were undercover officers within the roster. The group later escalated its frustration into a formal lawsuit on March 30 against the LAPD and the city for the disclosure and urged it to reclaim the information it released, according to KNBC.
In turn, on April 5, City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto’s office sued Camacho, Stop LAPD Spying, and any John Doe who held the records, arguing the named defendants were “willfully exposing” the names of officers “despite knowing that they are not entitled to possess this information.” Camacho said he had no intentions or plans to use the names of undercover officers in his reporting.
“I was surprised and not surprised,” Camacho said. “I was surprised that they jumped straight to suing me and they jumped straight to suing me individually. To name me and not Knock LA, it felt like an intimidation tactic on their end, a scapegoat tactic on their end.”
Knock LA blasted the lawsuit in a statement on its website. “This action sets a dangerous precedent for journalists in the city of Los Angeles,” it said, noting the request complied with the state’s public records law. “Feldstein Soto should consider familiarizing herself with CPRA law before pursuing frivolous lawsuits on Los Angeles taxpayers’ dime.”
The lawsuit was a clear example of prior restraint, according to Jennifer Nelson, a senior staff attorney with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an organization dedicated to press freedom. Prior restraint is a form of censorship when an organization attempts to prevent another entity from forms of expression, such as publishing material. Nelson called the city’s attempt to suppress the documents “plainly unconstitutional.”
“I think it’s really problematic that the city would bring this type of lawsuit,” she said. “There’s no greater threat to free expression than government suppression.”
Even if the city erred in providing the full set of documents, “that doesn’t change the fact that these were lawfully obtained materials,” Nelson said.
“You can’t unring the bell,” she said, pointing to Supreme Court cases such as The New York Times’ successful effort to publish the Pentagon Papers and Nebraska Press Association v. Stuart. In the latter, the Supreme Court declared prior restraint “the most serious and least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”
The city of Los Angeles apparently disagrees. In a statement to The Daily Beast, a spokesperson for the City Attorney’s office said, “While there is strong public interest in governmental transparency, there is equally strong interest in the safety of LAPD Officers, especially those in sensitive and undercover assignments whose lives and families’ lives could be in grave danger as a result of this exposure. That is why we brought this suit—to have the photos of officers immediately removed from the website and to have the flash drive containing them returned.”
In its lawsuit, the city also noted that “these officers voluntarily expose themselves to serious risks to their personal safety to gather evidence necessary to prosecute crimes. Exposure of their true identities compromises current and future criminal investigations and exposes these officers to real and present danger of harm by the criminals with whom they engage.”
The lawsuit rattled Camacho, but nearly a week after the city filed the suit, he feels much more relaxed.
“I’m doing a lot better,” he told The Daily Beast by phone on Monday. In an interview, Camacho called the city’s attempt to cull back the records “an attack on my First Amendment rights, an attack on press freedom.”
“It’s a huge issue,” he said. “It would be detrimental to the rights of the public and the rights of journalists and detrimental to the California Public Records Act.”
Camacho says he’s received overwhelming support from multiple journalistic organizations, including a coalition comprised of the Society for Professional Journalists, the Los Angeles Press Club, and the Radio Television Digital News Association, among others. “The City Attorney’s additional threat of law enforcement seizure sends a chilling warning to any journalist or individual who would lawfully use the Public Records Act to learn about their own government,” it wrote.
For his part, Camacho has no plans to help the city unring its own bell. He said he has heard from multiple people who have downloaded, archived, and torrented the material, making it virtually impossible for the city to destroy all copies.
“Me returning the records doesn’t really do anything there,” he said. “Public records belong to the public.”
