police commission

California police officers accused of misconduct are already shielded by some of the strictest confidentiality laws in the country, but state lawmakers are considering adding more layers of secrecy this week.

The state Legislature is weighing Assembly Bill 1178, which press advocates and police watchdogs said would drastically expand the number of officers whose personnel records were exempt from public disclosure, essentially gutting police transparency bills passed in 2018 and 2021.

Last-minute changes to the bill last week would have allowed law enforcement agencies to deny requests for public records related to any officer who has worked an undercover assignment within the last two years, received a death threat in the last 10 years or anyone who has been assigned to a state or federal task force.

The office of Assemblywoman Blanca Pacheco (D-Downey) said the bill was initially “very narrowly targeted” to protect the identifies of active undercover officers who did not commit misconduct and are not under investigation but were present during wrongdoing by others.

Pacehco’s spokeswoman, Alina Evans, said the bill was amended in the state Senate at the request of the state Department of Justice, and Evans said the bill will not move forward if it is reinserted.

Asked for details about why the California Department of Justice pushed for the amendment, a spokesperson for state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said: “We regularly provide technical assistance on legislation, but we can’t comment on any specific discussions with legislative offices or committees.”

Opponents contend that the proposal’s original language could still allow undercover officers to have their names kept secret even if they are involved in a fatal shooting or accused of serious misconduct, but Evans said their names would still be subject to disclosure, just like any other officer’s would be under the current law.

The last-minute lobbying push around Pacheco’s proposal is one of several late bids to water down pro-transparency bills that have been introduced this year, said Shayla Wilson, policy and advocacy advisor for La Defensa, a criminal justice reform advocacy group.

“At a time when public trust in law enforcement continues to dwindle, further redactions in police misconduct records is not the right move,” she said. “Generally the public is unaware of how often these [police misconduct] violations happen, or how egregious they are.”

Transparency advocates have sought to expand public access to police personnel files, as well as records related to civilian oversight bodies and misconduct litigation. Efforts to open access to misconduct records have repeatedly run into aggressive opposition from police unions, one of the most powerful political forces in the Capitol.

LAPD officers conduct an operation on Slauson Avenue in July.

(Luke Johnson / Los Angeles Times)

The unions and their allies have argued that California’s confidentiality rules protect officer safety and privacy — and prevent so-called doxxing incidents, in which personal information about officers is spread online.

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell did not respond to several attempts for comment through a spokesperson. The Police Commission, the department’s civilian watchdog, said in a statement that it supports Pacheco’s legislation.

“There is valid concern for the safety of officers whose assignments require anonymity as well as employees who have been subject to death threats — and their families. The Commission does believe that transparency is important but feels it is crucial to strike a balance between the public’s right to know and the safety of officers and their families,” the statement said.

The commission’s statement did not cite specifics but noted, “there have been times when the disclosure of records has provided safety concerns for officers and by default an [undue] level of access to their families, including their minor children.”

The proposed changes to state law come amid ongoing litigation over the publication of thousands of mugshot-style photos of LAPD officers obtained by an L.A.-based journalist and the watchdog group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.

The journalist, Ben Camacho, obtained the images via a California Public Records Act request and published them on a searchable website called Watch the Watchers. The site describes itself as a transparency tool for people to identify officers who have committed misconduct.

But shortly after the site went live in March 2023, LAPD officials announced that they had inadvertently released photos of officers who worked undercover. The disclosure led to a tangle of legal cases, including a claim filed by the city of L.A. against Camacho and his organization trying to claw back the pictures.

Last June, the city settled the suit, agreeing to pay the legal bills for Camacho and Stop LAPD Spying. In the process, the city has backed away from initial claims that many of the officers whose photos were released were put in danger because they worked undercover. Police unions also sued over the photos, making similar arguments about the safety of officers being compromised, but their claim against the LAPD was dropped in April.

The Los Angeles Times was among the outlets to join a coalition of news organizations that spoke out against the city’s lawsuit against Camacho, arguing that forcing him to return the photos “would set a dangerous precedent that will undermine the news media’s ability to freely disseminate lawfully obtained information to the public.”

Los Angeles City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto is among those who has lobbied California lawmakers to weaken the state’s public records law. In the summer of 2023, she proposed a change that would allow government agencies to decline future public records requests that seek “images or data that may personally identify” employees.

The Los Angeles Police Department on Tuesday released a report touting a decline in shootings by officers in 2024, even as officials acknowledged this year’s numbers show the trend reversing with a major uptick in incidents of deadly force.

LAPD officers opened fire on 29 people last year, compared with 34 in 2023 — a sign, the report’s authors maintained, that the department’s efforts to curb serious uses of force are having an effect.

Already in 2025, however, LAPD officers have surpassed the total number of shootings recorded last year, with police opening fire at least 31 times in less than nine months.

Teresa Sánchez-Gordon, who on Tuesday was announced as the Police Commission’s new president, said she was struck by the fact that during encounters with people exhibiting signs of mental illness last year, officers sometimes shot instead of first deploying weapons meant to incapacitate.

“Why can we not increase that … use of that less-lethal means?” asked Sánchez-Gordon.

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell told the commission that the use of Tasers and launchers that shoot hard foam projectiles was “foremost on everybody’s minds.”

But oftentimes, he said, encounters with people in crisis unfold so quickly and unpredictably that officers are left with little time to consider other tools. He noted that the vast majority of shootings stem from 911 calls, rather than “proactive policing,” which he said underscores “the reactive nature of these events.”

The timing of Tuesday’s report seemed incongruous amid mounting public anger over a recent rise in police shootings, including a continued pattern of officers killing people who appear to be in the midst of some behavioral crisis.

The report also noted a rising number of shootings last year in which officers mistakenly believe someone is armed, an increasingly common scenario that has also been cause for recent concern.

In July, LAPD officers fatally shot a man sitting inside a utility van on the city’s Eastside after, they said, he ignored repeated commands to drop what turned out to be a toy Airsoft gun, which resembled a real rifle. The dead man’s fiancee said he had dealt with mental health issues in the past.

In recent weeks, the commission has pushed McDonnell to do more to curb the number of shootings.

Last year, the Southeast, North Hollywood and Harbor patrol areas saw the biggest jumps in the number of police shootings, while 77th Street, Foothill, Rampart and Newton divisions recorded the biggest decreases.

The shootings cut across racial lines. Roughly 55% of those shot by officers were Latino, with Black and white people each accounting for around 21% of the incidents, with the remaining 3% involving Asians.

More than half of the officers who fired their weapons were Latino, which is roughly in line with the department’s racial makeup. A quarter of the officers were white, with Asian officers responsible for 11% of the shootings.

From 2023 to 2024, the number of officers injured in shootings rose from eight to 11, according to the report.

The rise in police shootings has been a regular point of contention for the police critics and social justice advocates who show up to speak at the commission’s weekly meetings.

On Tuesday, Melina Abdullah, a prominent civil rights leader who has long been critical of the department’s history of excessive force against communities of color, accused the commission of failing to take seriously its role as police shootings continue to rise.

“I don’t know how this oversight body is not overseeing and demanding something different,” she said.

The recent report found that officers fired nearly twice as many bullets last year as they did in 2020. On average, LAPD officers fired more than 10 rounds per shooting.

In addition to the decline in police shootings last year, the department’s report revealed that so-called non-categorical uses of force — LAPD speak for the deployment of a Taser or beanbag shotgun or incidents that result in serious but non-life-threatening injuries — dipped slightly to 1,451 from 1,503.

The decline came amid a drop in both crime and the number of people who came into contact with the LAPD in 2024.

There was also a significant decline in shootings of people with knives, swords and other edged weapons. Preventing those types of confrontations from turning deadly has been a point of emphasis by the department and the commission in recent years. In February, LAPD officers faced criticism after they shot and killed a transgender woman holding a knife at a Pacoima motel room after she called 911 to report that she had been kidnapped.

Much like with most crime statistics, experts caution against reading too much into year-over-year fluctuations. But department statistics show that despite the recent uptick, police shootings are still down considerable from their highs in the early 1990s and make up only a small fraction of all public encounters every year.

After Los Angeles police officers shot at people on three consecutive days late last month, the LAPD’s civilian bosses turned to Chief Jim McDonnell for an explanation.

The Police Commission wanted to know: What more could the department be doing to keep officers from opening fire?

But in his response at the panel’s meeting last week, McDonnell seemed to bristle at the notion his officers were too trigger-happy.

“I think what we’re seeing is an uptick in the willingness of criminals within the community to assault officers head-on,” he said at the Aug. 26 meeting. “And then officers respond with what they have to do in order to control it.”

The commission has heaped praise on McDonnell for his performance since taking over the department in November. But the exchange over the recent cluster of police shootings — part of an overall increase that has seen officers open fire in 31 incidents this year, up from 20 at the same point in 2024 — marked a rare point of contention.

Commission Vice President Rasha Gerges Shields told the chief that she and her colleagues remained “troubled by the dealings of people both with edged weapons — knives, other things like that — and also those who are in the midst of a mental health crisis.”

During a radio appearance earlier this year, the chief brushed aside questions about shootings, saying officers are often put into dangerous situations where they have no choice but to open fire in order to protect themselves or the public.

“That is something that’s part of the job unfortunately,” he said. “It’s largely out of the control of the officer and the department as far as exposure to those types of threats.”

Such remarks have left some longtime observers worried that the department is backsliding to the days when department leaders tolerated pervasive and excessive use of force. McDonnell’s defense of aggressive tactics during this summer’s pro-immigration protests, critics argue, sends a dangerous message to the rank-and-file.

The LAPD sits at a “pivotal” crossroads, according to Jorja Leap, a professor at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

The federal consent decree that followed the Rampart gang scandal of the late 1990s pushed the LAPD into becoming a more transparent and accountable agency, whose leaders accepted community buy-in as essential to their mission, said Leap.

Out of the reforms that followed came its signature outreach program, the Community Safety Partnership, which eschews arrests in favor of bringing officers together with residents to solve problems at some of the city’s most troubled housing projects.

Leap said support for the program has in recent years started to wane, despite research showing the approach has helped drive down crime. “The LAPD has now evolved into an inward-facing organization,” she said.

McDonnell was not available for an interview this week, an LAPD spokeswoman said.

Others faulted the chief for his response to the Trump administration’s immigration raids in Southern California, taking issue with the local police presence at federal operations and the aggressive actions of LAPD officers toward protesters and journalists during demonstrations in June.

Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said McDonnell seems unwilling to acknowledge how the sight of riot-gear-clad officers holding off protesters created the impression that police were “protecting the feds and the buildings more than the residents of L.A. who pay for LAPD.”

McDonnell has repeatedly defended his department’s response, telling reporters earlier this year that officers were forced to step in to quell “direct response to immediate, credible threats.”

He also issued an internal memo voicing his support to officers in the Latino-majority department and acknowledging the mixed feelings that some may have about the immigration raids.

After his public swearing-in in November, McDonnell acknowledged how much had changed with the department since he left in 2010, while saying that “my perspective is much broader and wider, realizing that we are not going to be successful unless we work very closely with the community.”

At the time, his appointment was viewed with surprise in local political circles, where some questioned why a progressive mayor with a community organizing background like Karen Bass would hitch her fortunes to a law-and-order chief. Others argued that McDonnell was an appealing choice: A respected LAPD veteran who also served as the chief in Long Beach and later as Los Angeles County sheriff.

After numerous scandals in recent years, McDonnell’s selection for the job was widely seen as offering stability while the city prepared for the massive security challenges of the upcoming World Cup and Olympic Games.

With an earnest, restrained manner, McDonnell has won over some inside the department who were put off by his predecessor Michel Moore’s micromanaging leadership style. After his much-publicized union battles during his tenure as sheriff, McDonnell has courted the powerful Los Angeles Police Protective League by putting new focus on police hiring and promising to overhaul the department’s controversial disciplinary system.

By some measures, McDonnell has also delivered results for Bass. Violent crime numbers continue to drop, with homicides on pace for 50-year lows.

But the two leaders have taken starkly different positions on the White House’s indiscriminate raids and deployment of National Guard troops.

McDonnell took heat during a City Council hearing in June when he described federal law enforcement officers participating in immigration operations as “our partners.”

Andrés Dae Keun Kwon, policy counsel and senior organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that McDonnell’s record on immigration was one of the reasons the ACLU opposed his selection as chief. Since then, Kwon said, the chief seems out of touch with the message of Bass and other local leaders rallying around the city’s immigrants.

“Given that we’re three months into this Trump regime siege of Los Angeles you’d think that the leader of this police department” would be more responsive to the community’s needs, Kwon said.

In a statement, Clara Karger, a spokeswoman for Bass, said that “each leader has a different role to play in protecting Angelenos and all agree that these indiscriminate raids are having devastating consequences for our city,” she said.

McDonnell’s relationship with the Police Commission has been cordial, but several department insiders — who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose private discussions — said that behind the scenes some commissioners have started to second-guess the chief’s handling of disciplinary cases.

The tensions were evident at the recent meeting when the issue of officer shootings led to a public dressing-down of the chief.

Echoing the frustrations of LAPD critics who flood the commission’s meetings on a weekly basis, board members questioned how it was possible that officers needed to fire their weapons on back-to-back-to-back days last month.

Commissioner Fabian Garcia called the three shootings “a lot.”

He and his colleagues told McDonnell they expected the LAPD to present a report on the shootings at a future meeting.

McDonnell responded, “Great, thank you,” before launching into his regular crime and staffing updates.