Over 300 Los Angeles undercover police officers are stepping up to sue the city following a giant leak of their sensitive information, putting their safety at huge risk.
Just this month, the undercover police officers declared that they will file a lawsuit against the city on grounds that the latter negligently exposed their sensitive information and assignments and endangering their lives by releasing to the public their department photographs along with images of thousands of other cops under the state’s public records law.
In an official statement released by Matthew McNicholas, one of three lawyers representing the officers, he revealed that “the City of Los Angeles’ reckless production of the undercover officers’ identities does irreparable damage to these individuals — their lives, careers and ongoing investigations are at risk.”
“The City of Los Angeles and LAPD have a duty of care to their employees and should have had appropriate safeguards in place to ensure nothing like this ever happened. They need to face responsibility for their catastrophic negligence.” McNicholas added.
The controversy arose after the Los Angeles Police Department accidentally released the names and photos of the undercover officers to a watchdog group that posted them on its website.
The group called “Stop LAPD Spying Coalition” reportedly launched a searchable online database called Watch the Watchers where the group published the photos, complete names, rank, ethnicity, date of hire, division/bureau and badge numbers of more than 9,300 city police officers.
According to Stop LAPD Spying officials, police officers are not entitled to the same expectation of privacy as other residents because of their status as civil servants.
Following the controversial disclosure, Hamid Khan, a coordinator with Stop LAPD Spying and an activist who opposes police intelligence gathering and is pushing for widespread reform argued that “If this is the case, first of all, we are just going off of what was given to us by the department and the city attorney’s office.”
“We’re not publishing their home addresses, we’re not publishing things that are outside their role as police officers,” he added.
Meanwhile, Police Chief Michel Moore claimed that he learned of the disclosure “after it had occurred and had in fact expressed my opposition to such a release in a media interview earlier that day.”
“I apologize to each member of this department impacted, and your families, for not having provided you with advance notice of this release. While I recognize that apology may be of little significance to you, each of you should be able to depend on me and this department to demonstrate the appropriate sensitivity in these types of situations,” Moore explained.
Moore also claimed that they would launch an investigation which “will include the timeline of events, those involved, the underlying analysis and rationale in reaching the decision to release the information, and protocols employed.”
“Additionally, it appears that once the decision was made to release the information, that appropriate safeguards were not put in place to ensure those assigned to sensitive investigations were not included, and that steps were taken to alert our membership of the required release.” Moore added.
