--- title: "An LAPD officer who recorded colleagues he says were racist is the one facing 13 years" description: "The Los Angeles County District Attorney charged LAPD Officer Daniel Flores, 43, with 16 felony counts of recording confidential communications. The recordings were made in 2024 in the unit that vets police applicants, and the DA's office says some of them captured sexist, homophobic and racist remarks. Flores took them to Internal Affairs himself. He faces up to 13 years. None of the officers he recorded is known to have been charged." category: "Los Angeles" category_url: https://herald.la/category/los-angeles author: "Simone Bishop" published: 2026-08-01T06:50:31.000Z updated: 2026-08-01T06:50:31.000Z canonical: https://herald.la/article/an-lapd-officer-who-recorded-colleagues-he-says-were-racist-is-the-one-facing-13 tags: ["lapd", "district-attorney", "nathan-hochman", "courts", "whistleblowers"] --- # An LAPD officer who recorded colleagues he says were racist is the one facing 13 years The Los Angeles County District Attorney charged LAPD Officer Daniel Flores, 43, with 16 felony counts of recording confidential communications. The recordings were made in 2024 in the unit that vets police applicants, and the DA's office says some of them captured sexist, homophobic and racist remarks. Flores took them to Internal Affairs himself. He faces up to 13 years. None of the officers he recorded is known to have been charged. The Los Angeles County District Attorney's office charged an LAPD officer on Friday with 16 felony counts of eavesdropping on or recording confidential communications. The recordings at the center of the case are, by the district attorney's own account, recordings of other officers using sexist, homophobic and racist language. Officer Daniel Flores, 43, made them during 2024 while assigned to the unit that conducts background investigations on people applying to join the department, [according to the district attorney's office](https://da.lacounty.gov/media/news/lapd-officer-charged-illegally-recording-colleagues-without-their-knowledge). He is due to be arraigned on August 10 in Department 30 of the Foltz Criminal Justice Center. If convicted on every count, he faces up to 13 years in state prison. ## The prosecution's argument California is an all-party-consent state: recording a confidential conversation without the agreement of everyone in it is a crime, and has been for more than 50 years. The district attorney's position is that this holds whatever the recording turns out to contain. "Your right to privacy in a confidential conversation is protected, no matter who is doing the recording or, with few exceptions, why they are doing the recording," District Attorney Nathan Hochman said in the office's release. His statement acknowledged that some of the conversations allegedly included sexist, homophobic and racist remarks, and argued that this does not create a legal justification for recording them. "One cannot simply choose to break the law because one wants to pursue a personal agenda," the office said, [CBS Los Angeles reported](https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/lapd-officer-charged-with-illegally-recording-colleagues-conversations/). LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said he supports the legal process now underway and that employees who fall short of the department's standards will be held accountable, [NBC Los Angeles reported](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/lapd-officer-who-complained-about-racism-at-work-charged-with-making-secret-recordings/3924361/). ## The defense's argument Flores did not put the recordings online or hand them to a reporter. He took them to his own department. "Daniel Flores did not leak this material," his attorney, Alan Jackson, told [NBC Los Angeles](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/lapd-officer-who-complained-about-racism-at-work-charged-with-making-secret-recordings/3924361/). "He walked it into Internal Affairs and gave it to his own department, in an official complaint." Jackson's summary of what followed is the sharpest line in the case: "The Department's answer was to investigate him. The District Attorney's answer is to prosecute him." Flores filed a harassment lawsuit against the department in June 2026, NBC Los Angeles reported. [MyNewsLA reported](https://mynewsla.com/crime/2026/07/31/lapd-officer-charged-for-recording-co-workers-making-racist-sexist-comments/) that he had also submitted complaints to Internal Affairs and the Police Commission in January 2025. ## What is not known Two things are missing from the public record, and both matter. The first is whether anything happened to the officers on the recordings. Neither the district attorney's release nor the news accounts state that any of them has been disciplined, and none is known to have been charged. The department has not said what its investigation of the underlying complaint concluded. The second is the content itself. The remarks are described as alleged, in the district attorney's release and in Flores's own complaint and lawsuit. The recordings have not been made public. What is established is that they exist and that prosecutors have listened to enough of them to characterize what is on them. ## Why this is a hard case The unusual feature here is that both sides can be correct at once. California's eavesdropping statute contains no general public-interest exception; a whistleblower who secretly records a colleague is exposed to the same felony liability as anyone else, and the legislature, not the district attorney, wrote it that way. At the same time, a workplace complaint about bigotry that depends on proof is difficult to make without evidence, and evidence of what people say in private is difficult to gather with their consent. That tension is the case. Flores is charged, not convicted, and has not entered a plea. ## Sources - [LAPD officer charged with illegally recording colleagues without their knowledge](https://da.lacounty.gov/media/news/lapd-officer-charged-illegally-recording-colleagues-without-their-knowledge) - [LAPD officer who complained about racism at work charged with making secret recordings](https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/lapd-officer-who-complained-about-racism-at-work-charged-with-making-secret-recordings/3924361/) - [LAPD officer charged with illegally recording colleagues' conversations](https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/lapd-officer-charged-with-illegally-recording-colleagues-conversations/)