The 404 Media Podcast (Premium Feed)

So using their own tools, I took a picture of them. I ran them through the facial recognition database. And I'm like, yeah. Is this you right here, you know, with your wife on the beach having steak dinner? It's funny how you were uncomfortable when I was doing a little research into you, the same things that you're walking around doing your yourself.

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. As a reminder, four zero four Media is a journalist owned company that makes content for humans, not AI algorithms. We need your support. To subscribe to support us, go to 404media.co. Subscribers get early access to our interview episodes, bonus episodes, and bonus segments on our normal weekly podcast.

I'm Jason Kepler, and I'm really excited about my interview this week with William Good, who runs Film The Police LA. Film The Police LA is a YouTube channel, Instagram account, and Twitter account where William does exactly what it says in the name. He films police in Los Angeles to hold them accountable. William has been doing this for years and has captured a series of police abuses during what are supposed to be routine traffic stops or other encounters that didn't need to be so tense. What I like about William's work is that it's a mix of very serious accountability journalism.

You cut the budget for sanitation and street services by $35,000,000, and then you're out here asking for volunteers to pick up the slack.

Mixed with some humor.

Good morning. Assistant chief, you're full of shit just like your boss.

William is a funny guy whose rapport with cops and the videos he makes often probably brings attention down between police and the people they have pulled over or are otherwise accosting. William also documents surveillance in Los Angeles and has taken to filming and talking to the Surve delivery robots in and around Hollywood as they often screw up, get stuck, or are messed with.

Hey. Run right into him. Keep going straight, Kelby. Keep going straight. Clip him.

We talk about the utility of filming the police, how people can get into police watching, what he's learned over the years, the state of the LAPD, the spread of surveillance, and what it means to surveil the police right back.

Yeah. I can't give you that information. Why can't you? I can't. Why?

Is there a specific code? Because I can't.

Here is my interview with William of Film the Police LA. So I'm here with William Good, from Film the Police LA. William, I've been a huge fan of yours for a long time. You make very important videos where you document what the police are doing in LA, the LAPD, but also just, like, all around. For people who don't know, LA is a series of a bunch of different cities that all have their own police departments and things like this, but I feel like you're kind of out and about anytime there's, like, a big protest here, like, when ICE was here.

Like, you're out filming, documenting this stuff. You've been documenting police surveillance. You've been documenting the serve delivery robots, which I feel are, to some extent, an extension of the police state and cameras and things like this. So, I mean, just to get started, how did you get into this? And, like, what is Film the Police LA?

Well, I first got into police accountability. It was back in 2020. It's when the George Floyd protests first started. And it was on like the third or fourth day of the protest, and they actually put a curfew in place. They said everybody had to be off the street by 04:30.

And there was a large protest actually not far from here in Hollywood. A couple thousand people, 04:30 hit, and they were actually trying to leave. But they're trying to get Ubers, and Ubers are like, No, we're not coming over there. And so they were sort of stuck. So they were slowly walking out of the area when I started seeing the sheriff's department come around and just immediately started shooting everybody with pepper ball bullets.

And everybody was like, What's going on? People were running around. I saw a group of young kids. The sheriffs circled them, pinned them in, and just let off on them and then drove right through the crowd. One of the kids hobbled in front of my apartment building.

He fell down. We pulled him inside the gate. His mouth was bleeding. He had a pink hat on and braces. And first thing he said to me is, I thought this was supposed to be nonviolent.

And it's sort of that moment right there kind of radicalized me because I was really pissed off about that because this kid wasn't a problem. And what they did see is kids weren't fair. The sheriffs were just letting off some aggression. So from that point forward, I started my journey into police accountability.

Do you have like a guiding principle or strategy for how you film the police? Are you just wandering around with a camera seeing what's going on, or or do people tell you you get tipped off like, hey. There's something happening here. There's a protest happening here. Because sometimes I see your videos and they are at, like, big protests, and other times, it's just pretty small.

It seems like you're kinda the only person there documenting what they're doing.

Yeah. I mean, I've gone through stages. So during in 2020, 2021 on the Hollywood Boulevard area, they call it the HED, the Hollywood Entertainment District. In that one strip, I filmed 2,000 stops. And what I noticed is I started filming police stops.

When I first started doing it, the cops were looking at me like I was crazy. They weren't used to it. They weren't used to people out there filming. So I wanted to not just document the stop, but I also wanted to empower other people to film the police too. Because what I noticed is on the very first stop I filmed, it was really messed up.

It was some kids, it was during COVID. They were stuck inside. They got their mom's car, and they were like, Let's ride up to Hollywood. And they're riding around Hollywood, just again, nothing to do, but they were outside. When the cops pulled them over for, I guess they failed to fully come to a stop sign, It lets them being pulled out of the car, handcuffed, car searched.

I was looking at them and they were like on the verge of tears. It's being violated for a California rule, which everyone out here does. And I was saying to myself, these kids right here, now they're gonna be pissed off, not just today, the rest of the weekends, weeks to come, months. They're gonna tell their friends. They're gonna tell their family about what happened to them and how they were violent.

So I went off and I started noticing that every time I was on a police stop, it was the same thing. 95% of the time, they're either black or brown, pulled out of the car, handcuffed, car searched. Doesn't matter what the violation was. If they fail to use a turn signal, the problem is we have the Fourth Amendment. And you can't search a person or a car because they make a traffic infraction.

So the LAPD was violating the law. And that was like my big fight for the first two years, really going after those types of unlawful stops, pretextual stops, biased policing, and documenting exactly what was going on out here. And then showing the public, Hey, you know, you're spending a lot of money on this police department. You're spending 47 percent of your discretionary budget on this police department. This is the product that's out there on the street.

Are you happy with this? Is this okay? And I feel like over time, myself and others obviously, we started bringing it to the public consciousness that these violations were happening. And we started seeing changes. Listen, policing out here in Hollywood is way different than it was back then.

Back then, I would never listen to a scanner and go looking for police stops. I would take my dog for a walk and bump into five of them on Hollywood Boulevard. And I would get out there. I'd see five stops happening. Like, which one am I gonna choose?

Well, there's Escobar. I can't stand him. Let me go to his stop. And now that doesn't happen. They're not pulling people over as often.

They're not automatically pulling people out of car and searching them. So I think we brought that to the public consciousness. Things changed, and I kind of backed away from the stops for a little while, but we still had other things going on. Right? So that's on the street level.

I wanna talk a little bit about the dynamic of of those interactions because I feel like around the time of the George Floyd protest, obviously, like, there were a series of cops murdering black people. And in many cases, there were cell phone videos coming out of of that footage. And and the reaction to that from police accountability folks at first was like, oh, we're gonna give body cameras to cops. And that's been honestly quite a mess. The police control often, like, when those are turned on, when those are not, very often, something violent will happen, but the body camera wasn't on or won't be released to the public.

And what ends up happening is, like, when the body camera footage makes the police look good, they release it, like, instantly. But when there is something where there's police abuse, it's very hard to get that footage. There's, like, missing seconds or minutes or there's no sound, things like that. And I feel like in that absence, there has been a movement of people to, like, take out their phones and start filming the police. In the beginning, like, there was a push there was a big pushback from cops saying, don't do this.

And I feel like there's still some of that, but to me, it now seems like people understand their rights. They understand that they have the right to film cops. And I'm curious now sort of, like, what the dynamic is between you and the LAPD when you are filming them, and has it changed over the last six years that you've Man. Been doing

So again, the first stops I would come on, they would look at me like, what are you doing? How dare you film me? Now the dynamic is, I mean, when I come around with my phone, they start scattering. The LAPD had a commission meeting 09:30 the other day. They delayed it for an hour and a half.

I had an hour and a half to kill. So I was walking around the neighborhood. I see a police stop. They have a homeless guy up against the wall handcuffed. They have about seven, eight cops right there, four lurking around.

And then one of them I noticed was Kelly Munions. He's a captain three. She used to be like the face of the LAPD, their spokesperson. She was out there. I'm like, why do you have a captain out here to deal with a homeless person?

But while I was saying that, she was trying to get out of there. She's like, hi. How are you doing? And she knew I was filming, so she wanted to give her best face. But then she started scattering, and the other cops started scattering because when somebody comes around with the phone, they don't really wanna hang around much anymore.

If it's not their stop, nothing's good gonna come of it. And especially with somebody with a loud mouth like me who's gonna say, Hey, why do we have nine cops here when you guys tell us, You're taking all our money. You're saying you're understaffed, and this is what you're doing? Going after a homeless person a block away from the police station? Is this a good use of our funds?

So things have completely changed over the last five years. Now, again, when I first started filming the police, I would actually be very public in the way I do it. I wouldn't just kind of be hidden. I'd be out by the street showing people with my hands filming, so maybe they would feel more comfortable doing it themselves. And across the street, there's a gas station.

Those cashiers are able to work their entire shift with cameras on them. They go to the bank. Why are you uncomfortable being filmed? At the end of the day, having that third party view might actually help you. It might show something that your body camera didn't pick up.

And by the way, the way those body cameras are manipulated is ridiculous. They know the angles to move. They know how to block it with their arm. They know how to not turn it on at a certain time. At the end of their shift, they'll not even log it in as having an incident happened.

They're not checked unless it's like serious incident, like a police chase, a use of force, but they're not audited in any way. They'll release that information, the videos, when it serves them. They'll hide it other times. I was looking at a shooting that was released a few weeks ago. You could see they had their arms positioned in a way that it was blocking the body camera.

So they know how to do all the workarounds, all the more reason why you should have that third party on the street in public filming that incident.

I don't know if you were involved in any of this. Back in 2020, 2021, there were several instances in Beverly Hills where people were filming the police, and the police started playing popular songs, like copyrighted music under this, like, ridiculous theory that the person who would upload the footage would get copy striked on YouTube, and it would get taken down. Did that happen to you ever? Have you seen things like this happening?

Yeah. I think it's one these things that goes around on Facebook. And they're like, yeah, play some copyrighted music, and now they can't use it. Well, guys, that's not true. Okay?

Even if I'm live streaming, whatever, YouTube is such that if there is copyrighted music, when the video is done uploading, you can press a button and that music is removed and the quality is still good. Yeah, they've been doing that. They tried that hardcore for a couple years. It didn't work for them, but there are still a few scragglers out there who think that may work. It's kind of silly, kind of ridiculous when they're sitting, you know, playing some Disney music as you're filming them.

I remember when we were back at Vice, my colleague there, Dexter Thomas, covered some of those, and it was ridiculous then. It's ridiculous now. And it it was one of those like Streisand effect things where it's just like, they went so viral because it was so embarrassing that they thought that this would work.

That's the most effective tactic for me when going when fighting the police or just anybody, politicians, is coax them into doing something embarrassing to show how ridiculous they look and then amplify that. It just makes my job easy. You guys look silly. And again, you're doing things like this. You're playing music.

This is where our money goes, guys. We're an unserious city if we're doing this.

I wanna ask you, are you mostly just out there with your cell phone? Do you have a kit? Like, if you're going to a protest, how do you keep yourself safe? You just show up and

know from Most of my cop watching is done accidentally. Right? It's just I spend a lot of time walking around with my dog. And during the course of that time, I'll run into police stops. I'll see a helicopter.

Cops would always say, How did you know that we were over here? Well, there was a helicopter overhead with a light shining down directly on you. It's pretty easy to find, right? Not like I'm listening to scanners. I just bump into these things, and I kinda know where they're gonna be happening.

So it's accidental. When I go to protests, I'm not a protest guy. I show up when the cops show up. So if I see that something's happening, it's a large protest, maybe I'll show up and I'll get on a scooter, and I'll ride around the area to see where they're staging at. But at the end of the day, I just wanna be there when the cops do show up to kinda document what's going on, hold them in check, and make sure that there's some accountability when they inevitably, inevitably start doing some violence?

Mhmm. So I've been very interested in this idea of watching the watchers of turning the cameras back on the police. I think most of my reporting over the last few years has been on police surveillance and the cameras and tools and just the incredible number of of ways that they have to get information to not only use their own cameras, but to subpoena information from other tech companies, things like this. I wanna talk about Flock in a minute, but I wanna start with the delivery robots because some of my favorite videos are of you talking to the Surve delivery robots, which are all over the place in LA, but especially in Hollywood, there are these delivery robots. They have names.

They have faces on them. You film them quite a lot. So are these robots cops in your mind?

Well, this is my most important activism to begin with. I have so many mixed feelings about them. At first, I didn't seem as that. I didn't know how they worked. I didn't know that they had a ton of cameras.

I kind of figured it was like a guy in remote control just delivering stuff. I'm like, all right, seems harmless enough. And then I didn't think it was very efficient because I just watched the way they move. They're very slow. They're running off the curbs.

If you're waiting for your delivery, it probably just takes forever, it seems like. And then I started seeing that they had those cameras. I was becoming kind of skeptical. I'm like, you know, what are they filming? You know, another thing that pissed me off was they were displacing a human.

Like truly, they are taking a human's job. Surveil will tell you, oh no, we have a human controlling them at intersections. Yeah, they're controlling multiple. So at the end of the day, you're gonna have fewer humans doing the job. They may seem benign right now, but what happens if it has that camera that's recording everything?

And then a major crime happens and the police say, Hey, we wanna subpoena the information. That's there. And it's being done on our public sidewalks using our public infrastructure. I have a little bit of a problem with that.

Yeah. So we did some reporting where basically, like, when there have been instances of people messing with these robots, the company can give that footage to the police. There's nothing stopping them from giving footage of some crime or anything that they sort of incidentally film to the police. The police could subpoena it. And I think it's a similar problem with Waymo where which are also all over LA.

It's like these are cameras on wheels that are filming at all times. They're being retained, and they're not specifically for police use, but they are surveilling at all times. And cops either know or they're going to find out that it's not a secret that they can go get this footage from these companies. These are technologies that I don't know. Theoretically, a driverless car I drive around LA.

People are horrible drivers. Like, some sometimes these Waymos, I'm like, oh, you're driving quite safely. But then there's been multiple instances where either Waymo has called the cops on its passengers or where cops have taken footage from a Waymo where the Waymo just happened to film some other sort of, like, potential crime. And so then I start thinking like, well, is this just an extension of the surveillance state?

At the end of the day, if if they can get a subpoena for it, that makes me uncomfortable. But a lot of times I'm thinking they won't need to get a subpoena for it. They can just go to the company, and the company will gladly deliver it to the police department because of course they wanna be in good standing with them because they wanna get more approvals and expand what they're doing. It makes me uncomfortable. Again, we can't think about what they're doing today.

We have to think about where this is going to lead. And like when we talk about these, you know, the police robot dogs, the quadruped spider, whatever you wanna call it, in theory, it sounds like, oh yeah, it's just going to get a picture of the person that's over there. How long before they have a gun attached to it? Like, it's gonna end up there eventually. So you have to think about where does it go with Waymo's?

Do we get to the point where, yeah, mean, you even need flock anymore? You have the Waymo's everywhere. Are they able to retain all the information and track using that information? Is it then given to a third party or directly to the police department? Is it given to, like, Police Foundation gets the information, and then is giving it to the police department?

There's a lot of questions that makes me uncomfortable.

Yeah. Let's talk about FLOC. I actually learned about this OIG report. For people who don't know, it's office of the inspector general. Most, like, government agencies have something like this where, basically, it's an oversight board that's quasi independent.

It usually is somewhat independent. Depends. It definitely depends on the department. Depends on what it is. But as we're recording last week in LA, they came out with an OIG report that basically found that the automated license plate readers in Los Angeles are being used all the time to pull over innocent people essentially because these license plates are ending up on a hot list, which is basically, like, the alert system that you can put in there.

And, basically, like, because of data entry errors and all of this sort of thing, innocent people are getting pulled over because the car is suspected as stolen. What did you make of this whole report? I saw you posting about it quite a lot.

Yeah. I've been on the other end of these over the last couple of years where they've been these stops. People have been pulled over for these stops, and they were innocent. This happened probably maybe a year ago was the last one. You gotta understand, OIG even says these are high risk stops.

So that's code word for you get this hit, they go to pull somebody over. They're not just turning on their sirens. Before they even turn on their sirens, they're on the radio saying, This is a code 37 stolen car. I need backup, air unit, and a supervisor. So you're asking for every cop in that area to come flying code three lights and sirens.

You're asking for the helicopter to get there, and it's gonna be there within seconds to minutes, and supervisors coming to scene immediately. Once that happens, they're gonna be ordered out of the car. They're gonna be told to turn around, walk backwards to them, get down the ground, lay down the ground, helicopter in the air circling low. It's crackling. Person that's given the command, you can barely hear what they're saying.

So you have this guy or woman on the ground laying there, and they can't really hear the command. So they're kinda looking over their shoulder, and anything can happen in those situations. Luckily, we haven't had a shooting in one of those situations I remember in recent years. It's inevitably going to happen. And it's happening because of not a human error, but a flock error.

Like you said, the OIG report, it's interesting. It's important to understand. The inspector general, yeah, quasi independent, but not really. The mayor appoints a chief, the mayor appoints the police commission, and the Police Commission appoints the OIG. The Police Commission is literally part of the LAPD.

They are the head of the LAPD, and they are putting in place the OIG. So it's like they're not really independent. Would that have been said, this report was astounding because they were so forthcoming with the problems. And getting that sort of honesty was surprising to me. That tells you that the problem's way worse than we think, right?

They had this flock contract. It's been in place for three years. It wasn't even signed by the city attorney. I work in finance. If you don't have contracts signed, it's not executed.

But they were operating with this MOU for three years without it. They even submitted to ethics, and it has to be resubmitted every three months. They never did that. But yet they had this contract in place. Nobody was able to get access to this contract until the earliest I was able to find it was February of this year.

Secret contract with FLAC. And when they were trying to get answers on how this data is being shared, they didn't really have the answers for it. And that report is the one that says that we're having, during a two month period, three high risk stops a day because of these flock errors on hit list.

Yeah. I believe it's a 116 in a two month period. One sixty one. One sixty one. Yeah.

So I wanna talk a little bit about how some of those errors may have come to pass, because it does say in that OIG report, basically, like, the LAPD has Motorola, it has Axon, and it has Flock. The Motorola ALPRs and Flock ALPRs are both pole mounted, so, basically, with static cameras. And then Axon, they have, I think, 2,500 of them or something like this, and they're in every single cruiser police cruiser that LAPD has. And, basically, there's, like, a data sharing agreement between Axon and FLoC where the cops are using FLoC's back end to search the Axon ALPRs are going into that back end. And so, basically, like, what's happening in addition to just, like, clerical errors, like typos, like people in other cities, like, putting a stolen car on a hot list, What's happening is either car is being stolen at some point, and then it's either being found or misreported as stolen, and then it's supposed to be taken off of this list, and it's not because they're combining data from multiple different departments or multiple different technologies at once.

And I think this just speaks a little bit to the fact that cops are taking all of these different surveillance systems, like smashing them together, and the oversight is a disaster.

Yeah. I mean, listen, on the basic level, the LAPD is going to mess up in their process as is. Then you add in all these other systems, agencies, and providers. I've seen people who were pulled over high risk stop, guns pulled, helicopter. Their car was stolen.

The LAPD found their car. They said, Come pick it up from the storage yard. The person had to come to the LAPD station, sign off the paperwork, go to the yard, pick up their car. Two days later, they're getting pulled over. Why?

For a stolen car by the LAPD, even though the LAPD was the one that released it. So if they're messing up on that level, now start adding in different systems and different agencies, and it's gonna be an absolute mess. Maybe before you start entering into these sort of agreements, nail your own systems. Make sure that your own records are kept up to par because they're not right now.

Mhmm. Mhmm. What do you think this is a crazy question, but what do you think the biggest problem with the LAPD is right now?

Lack of accountability. There's no accountability. In fact, this is getting worse. Right? So we have an agency.

Again, they get 47% of our budget. If they decide their own policies, right? I'm actually fine with their policies overall, right? I think there are people talk about what policy changes do you wanna see with LAPD. I don't wanna see any.

I think there are enough rules in place that kind of cover everything. Like don't beat people, follow the law. It's like simple stuff. The key thing is accountability. If a cop violates the law, violates policy, are they held accountable?

The answer is no. So 4% of public complaints are sustained. Only 4%. And you can catch a person I have an instance right down the street, four or five blocks down. There was a guy who was handcuffed, had his legs bound by the cops on the ground, and a cop came over and stepped on his face.

This was picked up by multiple cameras. It was on the news. I confronted the LAPD about it. Chief Moore at the time went on TV and said, We can see clearly what happens. This is terrible.

There's gonna be accountability, that stuff. I filed complaints over it. A year later, I get a disposition saying that my complaint was demonstrably false. And I wanted an explanation as why they ruled it that way. The top civilian at the LAPD wrote me and said, Looking at the body cam video, we can see that the man, when he stepped on his face, he didn't actually make contact with his face, and that the person on the ground never complained about it, even though it's on video.

You can see the guy having his face hit, skin stretched, head jerk around, and then the guy says like twenty seconds later, Why'd you step on my face? They just outright said it didn't happen. Here is video evidence that everybody can see. They said it didn't happen. And that's the end of story.

That's the system we're operating with. And then it's getting worse, right? So you have different classifications. A complaint can be sustained, which is guilty, can be unfounded, not guilty. Then you have this middle one.

It's called officer could have done differently, which basically means they're guilty, but we're not going to say it. And that way it's not counted in our sustained numbers. And because of that, you will never get access to that discipline file. And again, it's officer could have done differently, not should. So they're making it sort of optional when they violate the rules.

But then the lowest one is demonstrably false. Demonstrably false means that as soon as we reported it, we determined that day that it didn't happen. It's provably incorrect. And we closed out the case that very first day without an investigation. Worse than that, now you are potentially at risk of being prosecuted for a misdemeanor for filing a false complaint against an officer.

Again, when you have those demonstrably false, they never even get to the internal affairs. I can go to police station, file a complaint with the sergeant. He says demonstrably false right there. It's thrown out. That's the end of it.

We used to have four or five of those a year. And then it went up to 50 and then a 100. 2020, I think might've been 10 or 15. Last year, they were close to a thousand of those. So they're just throwing out complaints without even investigating.

And it's like, it's really kind of messed up. Back in '19 Was it 2004? I think you had the consent decree. And they went to the LAPD and said, You you're taking too long to adjudicate these complaints. Why?

They said, Oh, we're just, we're overloaded. We don't have the manpower. If you want us to adjudicate complaints faster, you gotta allow us to throw out complaints at the station level that we deem frivolous. They said, If you allow us to do that, we will adjudicate complaints in four to five months. Well, now they're able to throw them all out, and it still takes a year, eighteen months before you'll even see a disposition.

So it's complete nonsense. So again, like you said, what's the biggest problem with LAPD? There's no accountability. The cops know it. The chief right now, he has never ruled a shooting out of policy since he's been chief.

I see Scobin on the police commissioner. He's a commissioner. I really the only one worth a damn. I think he's ruled three or four out of policy in the last six months. People listen to the chief.

He's allowed these cops, and I said this to the commission the other day, he's allowed the police to feel untouchable, and because of that, shootings in LAPD went up 60% last year. You look at the surrounding agencies, LASD went down by 40%. Long Beach, they didn't have a single shooting last year. So they've gone down everywhere else but up at the LAPD because it's the culture of lack accountability. And this is with fewer public contacts.

They're having less contact with the public and shootings are going up. That's an institutional problem.

This is a somewhat frivolous example, but for people who kind of don't know what the process looks like, one of my favorite stories that I have done about the LAPD is about two officers who were fired for ignoring an armed robbery to go play Pokemon GO, which happened, I think, like

Southwest division.

Yeah. And it was, like, maybe four or five years ago at this point. And I really like doing stories that are, like, ridiculous that kind of, like, demonstrate the problem Yes. To some degree because they get attention, and then you can kind of, like, tell a bigger story through this. But, basically, like, these two cops were in a cruiser.

They got a call on the radio saying, like, hey. There's an armed robbery happening at this mall. They listen to it, and then they're talking about, like, oh, actually, they're they're both playing Pokemon GO, and they're like, oh my god. Like, a Snorlax just appeared, like, a few blocks over. And they ignore the radio.

They go play Pokemon GO. They catch the Snorlax. They're having, like, a great time, and they get caught doing this somehow. I I don't remember exactly how they got caught. But I filed, like, freedom of information requests for, like, the internal investigations, the body camera footage, like, all of the stuff that was associated with this.

And I did get it back, but it took three years. It took a really long time for this very ridiculous thing to kind of wind its way through the system. And I think that when you have, like, such a big sprawling city and big sprawling police department, it's like serious thing gets swept under the rug. And then, like, Pokemon GO, it did get investigated. These officers did get fired over this, but it took a very long time for this to happen.

And I think you that you just, like, apply it to actual serious problems where police are abusing their power, where they are doing violent things to constituents, things like this. They get swept under the rug, and when they do get investigated, it takes forever.

Yeah. Mean, it hits on a number of things. So first off, I believe it happened like during COVID. Right? During COVID, first off, the Police Department didn't COVID seriously.

And at any given time, there'd be like 10%, 15% of the force would be out on COVID leave. So then they were complaining that we don't have enough officers on the street. We need more officers. But you see what they're doing while they're on the street. One of the biggest things you'll hear right now, especially from Mithya Raman's running for mayor, is that response times are slow.

Well, it doesn't help when these guys are playing Pokemon Go back in an alley over here and not responding. And I've seen calls down the street where there was a car crash because a man and a woman were fighting. Was a domestic incident. Fighting in the car, causing the car to crash. They called it in over the radio asking people to respond, and I didn't hear any cops respond, and they kept on asking cops to respond.

Nobody was doing that, and I was watching a cop like literally three blocks away. I was three blocks away when this happened, and they're sitting in the car on their phones. All right? So we're dealing with response times maybe if the cops aren't sitting in the parking lots smoking their vapes or whatever they're doing, hanging out in there doing nothing. And if they were actually doing something, maybe response times would be better.

Maybe you wouldn't be asking for more money because that's always the fix. But then again, you hit on the fact that when there is some sort of incident that happens, how hard is it to get the documentation? How hard is it to get the CPRA fulfilled? I deal with that all the time. Think that's probably the second biggest issue in LAPD right now is the fact that you have these public requests and they're breaking the law and not fulfilling them.

First off, getting video from the LAPD is nearly impossible. It is impossible without a subpoena. It's just not going to happen. If they happen to film a car accident that was out there, they're not just gonna hand it over to your lawyer or your insurance company. You have to get the subpoena.

So you're dealing with that. But then when you try to get some sort of information from the LAPD, they put you through all sorts of hoops. It shouldn't be that way. So I deal with CPRAs all the time. I have a number of lawsuits in place right now against the LAPD to get information.

CPRA is California Public Records Act, if you didn't know. So basically California's public records law.

Yeah, and it's different than a FOIA. They're harder to get taken care of. And there aren't many lawyers out there that wanna do this type of work. Here's an example. I was looking through a discipline report that came out that's buried in the LAPD website.

They released it by accident like five years ago. I happened to find it. And then I confronted the police about some of the stuff that was in there and forced them to answer. And it kind of became normalized where they released it into the bowels of their website. And I'm looking at the Discipline Report in January.

It says two cops had sustained complaints for a number of different things, including being members of a law enforcement gang. So I saw like a law enforcement gang. You have gang members in the LAPD. Who are these cops? I need to know who they are because they have some people in jail right now.

I'm sure those people that are in jail who are convicted and their lawyers would like to know about this information. Not to mention they had sustained complaints for unlawful search for biased policing. I wanted to know. The law says under SB fourteen twenty one that they have a maximum of forty five days to turn that information over. The only exception is they can extend it another sixty days if there's a criminal investigation, but there are no other exceptions under the law.

You have to turn it over in forty five days. They routinely, when I request this information, extend these things for years, Just outright breaking the law. They say, Well, we don't have enough staff. Well, that's nonsense, right? You get half of our budget.

If there's three cops sitting at the Hollywood Station in the lobby right now watching SportsCenter doing nothing with their feet kicked up, I don't know. Send some of those guys over to the CPRA department. You have like four people over there that handle these. But yeah, they violate the law regularly, and their whole thing is, Hey, if you really want it, then sue us. And you'll sue and you'll win, right?

And my lawyers will sue and they win, and they'll get their fees covered, fifteen, dollars twenty thousand for these lawsuits. But who's paying for that? Taxpayers are paying for it, not the LAPD. So they don't care. Their whole thing is delay, delay, delay.

Break the law. There's a law that says that police are not allowed to post pictures of people arrested on social media with their handcuffs on or anything like that because it's prejudicial. You're not allowed to do that under the law, but the LAPD does it all the time on their social Right now on their LAPD Rampart website, their Facebook page. They have that all the time. I tell them to take it down, bring it to the commission.

Commissioners know what needs to come down. They confront them. The LAPD doesn't do it. They do what they want.

We've seen a lot of ICE activity in LA over the last twenty four months or so. I know that you have filmed some of that. I'm curious, what did you see in those interactions? What was the dynamic between ICE and the LAPD? What did you make of sort of the experience that you had documenting that?

Well, it's funny. Right? So from the first operation back in, I think it was probably June 5 or June 6, I remember they were setting up, it was border patrol, FBI, and all that. I mean, they were in Chinatown, set up in the parking lot. It was 09:00 one night and they must've had seventy, eighty personnel out there, armored vehicles, all that stuff.

And I remember I was just, you know, they had some protesters out there. People were pissed off. You're doing this right in the middle of Chinatown. Like it's kind of really, disrespectful. And there was this one FBI guy.

They were getting ready to do a raid. And he was kind of like laughing at the crowd, just mocking them. And I was like getting really annoyed. And my thing is, when I see a cop, I just take pictures of them usually, especially during COVID. When they were required to wear masks during COVID, I would take pictures of them when they didn't have masks because there's just an easy way to mess with them, but I also wanted their pictures because I wanted to create a database of cops.

They track us. I wanna track them for when they commit misconduct. I see this guy acting like a jerk. I'm like, This guy's gonna eventually do something. I wanna know who he is now.

So using their own tools or similar tools against him, I took a picture of him. I ran him through the facial recognition database, and I'm like, yeah, is this you right here with your wife on the beach having a steak dinner? Is your wife proud of you out here mocking the crowd? The look on his face, he just sunk. Then he went over to his supervisor, started pointing at me, started taking pictures of me like, They're gonna have me arrested.

And I'm telling the lady next to me, I'm Here, get ready to take my phones in case they try to arrest me. But it's funny how you were uncomfortable when I was doing a little research into you, the same things that you're walking around doing yourself. You guys are all wearing your masks, trying to hide your face. You know why. And I'll be honest with you, some of the times those masks don't even You're able to just with the eyes alone, a little bit of Especially if they're wearing a feisty type mask.

You can still figure out who they are. It's funny how when the tables are turned, you don't like it. So when it came to ICE stuff, I usually just go out there, try to document the cops, figure out who they are. They act like jerks when they're doing their operations. Why can't you just be a professional and just do your thing?

Instead, you have to like rub it into people's faces and agitate the community. It's frustrating. And so therefore I'm gonna do what little I can back. If a mother who works at a fruit stand is taken and she leaves her two kids behind who are eight and 12, Can we gather the resources to get the kids taken care of? That's the only thing I can do.

It's frustrating. Going up against federal government, it is what it is. But

yeah. Do you have like a favorite interaction that you have filmed? Some of them are funny. Some of them are bleak and dire. Sometimes you have this very interesting back and forth with cops because they they know you at this point.

Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because it's a lot of times it's traumatic for me. I'll film something that happens, and trauma to me isn't seeing somebody beaten up. Do I see cops beating up people often?

No. It's protests all the time. All the time. But regular policing, it doesn't happen. They don't do it right in front of your face.

They see a camera there. Like we're all different. Know, when the people are watching, we act differently, right? Cameras are on us. We're gonna act different.

When I'm at home and nobody's watching, I'm dancing with my dog and things like that. Cameras change behavior, and that's a good thing. But then there's those moments like, you know, seeing guys, yeah, I think of one guy, he was working late night. He did office cleaning and floor waxing, gets off work, gets into his car. He's driving home.

And some lady just randomly says, This guy an hour ago shot at me. And he's pulled out of the car and put on the ground. And they pull everything out of his car. And then they just like, it was over to his left. Then the guy's sitting there, his stuff's on the ground, and he wasn't able to just get in his car and leave.

He was so shaken. He had to sit there for forty five minutes and his car was partially blocking traffic on Hollywood Boulevard, but he couldn't drive. I mean, that's one of them, but I gotta tell you, could think of so many stories like that. I could think of so many stories where during COVID and everything would close, and these kids would just come to Hollywood Boulevard to hang out because you could at least have some human interaction. These kids lost their whole senior year of high school.

So they just wanna come out there and they're filming. Back then, they didn't have any entertainment except for like what? TikTok and Instagram. So they're out there walking down Hollywood Boulevard filming their little videos, and the cops will say, Oh, you must be gangbanging. Let's put them up against the wall and handcuff them and search them.

And now those kids, after that, they're just demoralized. And again, that affects not just them, it affects their family members. It affects their community. So I don't I have so many. I can't think of any one that sort of stands out.

There's just so many, and they At this point, they've all kind of become blended and sort of rot in my mind.

Have there been any cases that you've filmed where you feel like there was accountability on the other side?

No, all the time. Again, back here when I first started in the HED, there were 71 cops assigned to it. So from Hollywood Boulevard, from La Brea down to Gower, between like Sunset to Franklin, that was their area. They had 71 cops there when I first started. Within a year, that was knocked down to 23.

And during that time, crime went down. So you constantly hear the only way to decrease crime is to hire more cops, more police spending. What I showed is that with fewer cops, crime goes down. So it doesn't mean that fewer cops reduces crime. It just means that that narrative that you have to increase the number of cops to decrease crime is just false.

So I've seen that happen. I've seen Policing in Hollywood is just way different. Anybody who lives in Hollywood, if you've been on Hollywood Boulevard in 2020, 2021 at night, you were gonna see a police stop happening at that time. You just don't see that happening. Hollywood Boulevard has other problems.

The economy's not doing well. Tourism is terrible. Hollywood is a mess, and there's that. It had an effect on quite a few things.

Do you have any advice for people who may want to document the police in their local communities?

Listen, I think that if you see something happening, just go record it. It's going to change behaviors. It keeps people safe. Like I said to the cops, it might protect you for all you know in case something happens. Who knows?

All you have to do is just do the basic thing. You see something happening, go ahead and record it. You don't even have to record. You could stand there. Standing there is good enough.

And then if you wanna take it further than that, if you wanna start going out the systems, good. But just kinda being present, kinda standing there, document, record if you can, if you feel comfortable. If you don't feel comfortable, I get it. I can understand why somebody doesn't feel comfortable. But again, just being there is enough.

And you don't have to argue. You don't have to interject yourself in the situation. You don't have to make any accusations. You don't have to be super close. My thing is I Cameras, I can always zoom.

As long as you're not blocking the angles, that's what pisses me off. You tell me to go behind a car where I can't see what's going on, I have a problem. If you're at eight feet away and they say step back to 12 feet, then like, do it. It's not a big deal. And it's helpful if you know the laws and the policies.

Yeah. I was gonna ask if you feel like you need a specific type of demeanor to do this this kind of work. Because because I see you you have a lot of patience. It's pretty tense sometimes, but you keep your cool when you're doing this.

Yeah. I I feel like I know what I'm doing. Right? And I know LAPD policy, and I'm reasonable. Yeah, I don't really get too excited over things.

Listen, if I'm angry and yelling at somebody, I might be pissed, but I'm under control. I'm not out of control. I don't know if it takes a certain demeanor. I just know what works for me. I know the person that I am.

I'm not gonna back down. If you ask me something unreasonable, I'm not gonna do it. And if I see a policy being broken, it's hard for me to stay quiet. And it's not just the cops. It's just like, if I see somebody being wronged out there in the street, if I walk into the gas station and you got this guy bullying the old lady cashier, I got a problem with that.

It's hard for me to keep my mouth quiet. So I only kinda know what works for me. I always felt like I had a, I don't know, like a multiplier effect because I would go out there and film these incidents and then go ahead and post it on social media so I can create this sort of media narrative. And I like to tie things, tell a story along with it and tie it into other things. That works for me.

I don't know if you can necessarily duplicate that for everybody, but you just have to find what does work for you and do your part.

Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the work that you do. It's very important. People can find you at Film the Police LA on every platform.

Yeah?

Yeah. Everywhere.

Cool. Thank you.

Thank you, man.

Thanks so much to William for doing this episode with me and for the work that he does. You can find his work at Film The Police LA on all social media platforms. This episode was filmed at Third Wheel Podcast Studio in Hollywood. It was edited by Alyssa Midcalf. You can subscribe to four zero four Media at 404media.co.

If you like this episode, please tell your friends about us. And if you're listening audio only, consider checking us out on YouTube also. I'm Jason Kevlar. We'll be back with a new episode in a few days.