Los Angeles will pay $300,000 to settle lawsuit against journalist over undercover police photos

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles has agreed to pay $300,000 to cover the legal fees of a local journalist and a technology watchdog group that was sued by the city last year for publishing photos of hundreds of police officers’ names and photographs. undercover documents obtained through a public records request, the journalist’s lawyer said Monday.

The release of the photos generated widespread backlash from Los Angeles police officers and their union, alleging that it compromised the safety of those working undercover and in other sensitive tasks, such as investigations involving gangs, drug and sex traffickers. The city attorney’s subsequent lawsuit against Ben Camacho, a journalist for the progressive news outlet Knock LA at the time, and the watchdog group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition drew condemnation from media rights experts and a coalition of newsrooms, including the Associated Pressas an attack on freedom of expression and freedom of the press.

Camacho filed a public records request for the LAPD roster — about 9,300 officers — as well as their photographs and information such as name, ethnicity, rank, date of hire, badge number and division or office. City officials did not seek exemptions for undercover officers and inadvertently released your photos and personal data to Camacho. The watchdog group used the records to create an online searchable database called Watch the Watchers.

The city attorney’s office filed the lawsuit in April 2023 in an attempt to recover the photos, which had already been released publicly. The settlement came after the city approached Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying last month to enter mediation over the case, said Camacho’s attorney, Susan Seager.

“It shows that the city is recognizing that … when the city gives some documents to a reporter, they can’t go back and sue the reporter and demand that they give them back after the fact,” Seager said.

Seager said that if the city had won the lawsuit, “any government agency would be suing reporters left and right to recover documents they claimed they did not intend to give them.”

The city attorney’s office did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday. The LAPD declined to comment.

“This case was never just about photographs,” the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition said in a statement. “It was about the public’s relationship with state violence.”

The city will also have to drop demands that Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying return images of officers in sensitive roles, remove them from the Internet and forgo publishing them in the future, according to Los Angeles Times. The agreement now heads to the City Council and mayor for approval, according to court documents.

“This agreement is a win for the public, the First Amendment, and ensures we will continue to have radical transparency within the LAPD,” Camacho said Monday in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.

Camacho still faces a second lawsuit filed by the city attorney’s office to force him and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition to pay restitution to LAPD officers who sued the city after the photo was released.