City Will Pay $300k Settlement To Journalist It Sued For Legally Obtaining LAPD Officers’ Photos

Legal Issues

from the one-lawsuit-down,-one-to-go dept

This is one of the stupidest things ever in terms of public records lawsuits. And that’s saying a lot, considering how often this site has covered public records lawsuits.

This traces back to April of last year. Ben Camacho, a Los Angeles journalist who contributes to sites like Knock LA, sent out a records request for photos of all active LAPD officers. After some early litigation (filed by Camacho), the city agreed to turn over the records. The photos then were placed in a searchable database by activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.

That made LA cops very angry. The police chief demanded the city “prosecute” Camacho for legally obtaining records from the city. The LAPD’s union got in on the action as well, suing the city for releasing the photos and demanding Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying “return” the photos Camacho had lawfully obtained.

That didn’t go anywhere, but the city apparently still felt compelled to oblige the LA police union. It filed a cross motion naming Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying as defendants while simultaneously asking the judge to excuse it from the lawsuit, arguing that it had done nothing wrong.

That’s an insane argument to be making when you’re also arguing the people who received the records you released are somehow doing something wrong. And that probably explains why the city is now buying its way out of one of the lawsuits related to these photos it’s currently engaged in, as Libor Jany reports for the LA Times.

The city of Los Angeles has agreed to pay the legal bills for a local journalist and a group of activists whom it took to court last year for publishing photographs of LAPD officers, part of a tentative settlement that will end a lawsuit some saw as an assault on media freedom.

Under the agreement, which still needs to be approved by the City Council, Knock LA journalist Ben Camacho and the group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition will receive $300,000 for lawyer fees. They were sued for publishing thousands of officers’ pictures that the city had itself provided in response to a public records request.

That’s just the proposal. The defendants still need to agree to it and then a judge needs to wave a gavel above it to make it final. As is almost always the case in lawsuit settlements, Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying will have to agree the city did nothing wrong before being allowed to cash the check.

That likely won’t be a problem for the defendants. After all, the city — as it stated in its own cross-motions in the lawsuit filed against it by the police union — stated it had done nothing wrong by complying with the records request. And the recipients of the legally obtained records likely feel the city didn’t break the law here, either. While they may have some hard feelings about the bogus litigation, they’ll be getting paid for having their time, money, and energy wasted.

But it’s not all over yet. As the LA Times article notes, there’s still plenty of litigation that hasn’t been settled or ruled on, including the union’s lawsuit against the city. That’s the one where the city has tried to convert the recipients of the photos into the defendants, despite the fact the union sued the city over the release of the photos and never bothered to name Camacho or Stop LAPD Spying as defendants.

However, that lawsuit really isn’t Camacho or Stop LAPD Spying’s problem at the moment. The bigger problem might be the LA city attorney, Hydee Feldstein Soto. Seemingly distressed by this inadvertent transparency (and the resulting litigation), Soto is seeking to make things worse for California residents.

Feldstein Soto also began lobbying California lawmakers to weaken the state’s public records law to allow government agencies to decline future public records requests that seek “images or data that may personally identify” employees.

Finally, despite all assertions otherwise, the LAPD and the union suing the city have yet to provide any evidence that any officers’ safety has been threatened or otherwise diminished by the release of these photos. The early claims were that undercover officers would be jeopardized by public dissemination of officer photos. But in the year-plus since the data dump, nothing has come to light showing the publication of the photos did any harm to the LAPD or its officers.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, ben camacho, foia, journalism, lapd, public records, stop lapd spying, transparency