Names, photos of Los Angeles undercover police posted online
The Los Angeles police chief and the department’s constitutional policing director are under investigation after the names and photographs of undercover officers were released to a technology watchdog group that posted them online, the Los Angeles Times reported.
LAPD Chief Michel Moore offered his “deep apologies” to the undercover officers, who were not given advance notice of the disclosure, during a police commission meeting Tuesday.
The watchdog group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition posted more than 9,300 officers’ information and photographs last Friday in a searchable online database, the Times reported, following a public records request by a reporter for progressive news outlet Knock LA.
The database includes information on each officer including name, ethnicity, rank, date of hire, badge number and division or bureau. It was not immediately clear how many of the officers listed were undercover.
Stop LAPD Spying Coalition opposes police intelligence-gathering and says the database should be used for “countersurveillance.”
“You can use it to identify officers who are causing harm in your community” the group wrote. “Police have vast information about all of us at their fingertips, yet they move in secrecy.
