An officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, charged with illegally recording his colleagues, is expected back in court on Thursday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Daniel Flores was charged with 16 felony counts for taping other officers allegedly making racist and homophobic comments.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The LA County District Attorney says his office will now lower those felony charges after reaction from the community.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The latest turn in this case is DA Nathan Hochman saying he understands the concerns some people had about his office targeting a whistleblower in the LAPD.<\/p>\n
Daniel Flores worked in a recruiting and employment office for the LAPD.<\/p>\n
According to a lawsuit, Flores filed against the city in June \u2014 his supervisor and colleagues there were allegedly making racist, homophobic, and sexist remarks while at work.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors say Flores secretly made more than a hundred recordings of conversations with other LAPD personnel, and this month Flores was charged with 16 counts of felony recording confidential communications.<\/p>\n
At first, the LA DA\u2019s office said this case was about accountability for an officer who behaved illegally instead of going through the proper channels to address the other officers\u2019 behavior.<\/p>\n
If convicted, he could have spent more than a decade in prison.<\/p>\n
But the case caused strong reaction both among community advocates and elected officials like mayor Karen Bass, who said sending Flores to prison could discourage future whistleblowers from coming forward.<\/p>\n
This week the DA announced he was lessening the charges to misdemeanors, and Flores could avoid prison time altogether.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re not going to dismiss the case, because this individual, daniel flores, committed the wrongful conduct, but a more reduced charge, which is a misdemeanor charge, and 16 of them, we thought conveyed the appropriate, balanced message that we are both going to hold people accountable, but do it in a fair way,\u201d Hochman said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Flores is expected to go through a court diversion program, which means that if he doesn’t break the law again, the entire criminal matter would be dismissed next year, and ho would have no record of a conviction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, charged with illegally recording his colleagues, is expected back in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438473,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[48,52,51,5015,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-438472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lapd","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438472"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438472\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}