Memo to the L.A. Times editorial department

Oct 2009

The Los Angeles Times newsroom has been hit hard with layoffs. That may explain why the editorial writers are apparently clueless about a 2006 court decision favoring LAPPL’s strong stand in support of police officer privacy. (Copley Press v. Superior Court (2006) 39 Cal 4th 1272; you can read the LA Times coverage of the ruling at: http://articles.latimes.com/2006/sep/01/local/me-police1.)

Sunday’s editorial, “The LAPD’s come a long way” made some good points but this one sentence left us scratching our heads and rushing to the keyboard:

Rather than secure for officers the wages and benefits they deserve, the Los Angeles Police Protective League – sometimes with Bratton’s complicity – has fought to protect individual officers from public scrutiny despite the public nature of their work.

Huh?

First and foremost, we have always worked hard to protect and promote the wages and benefits police officers deserve.

We invite the LA Times editorial department to make a note of our organization’s mission statement: The mission of the Los Angeles Police Protective League is to vigilantly protect, promote, and improve the working conditions, legal rights, compensation and benefits of Los Angeles Police Officers.

That has been and will continue to be one of our core missions – and, for most of 2009, precisely what we focused on in securing a tentative labor contract for our 9,900 members.

Equally important, we fight for the legal rights of LAPD officers. Like all other Americans, police officers have a right to keep their personnel records private. Employee disciplinary proceedings (and litigation matters) have never been in the public domain.

The public has a right to know the names of officers if they are indicted for a crime, and the public has the right to know that internal investigations of police officers are fair and above reproach. But allegations made in administrative disciplinary proceedings, which may or may not be true, should not be available to the media, where officers and other employees would have no legal recourse and could not defend themselves against such reports. This is why we fight so hard for officers’ rights of privacy and, thankfully, the state Supreme Court agrees.

We thought of sending this in a letter to the editor – but the Times seems to never publish our letters. Frankly, with all the cutbacks at the newspaper, our blog just might be getting greater readership these days anyway.

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