LA Squawk Box for Thursday, July 30, 2026

LAPD official watchdog is seeking input on Flock-style digital surveillance, progressive LA group endorses Nithya Raman, LAPD public records no longer getting posted online, and more.

What’s happening today?

The official watchdog of the Los Angeles Police Department will hold an online “listening session” at 4 p.m. to take public input on LAPD’s use and oversight of digital surveillance tech to gather license plate information. This data allows the LAPD to track individual vehicles traveling around the city. Many have described this tech as creepy, and there are worries (stemming from reporting on Flock in particular) that federal government officials may have access to them. But several communities around Los Angeles seem to want them enough that they have donated them to the LAPD to try out, even though it then results in maintenance and operating costs. Some council offices like those of Traci Park and John Lee have even put their district’s discretionary funds into providing this surveillance capability for the police stations covering their districts.

The police department uses “automated license plate reader” tech provided by Flock and Motorola, as well as Axon to a certain extent, according to a July 10, 2026 Office of Inspector General report that was presented to the Board of Police Commissioners on July 14. By “to an extent,” I mean that Axon — which has contracts for LAPD’s tasers, body-worn cameras and in-car cameras — partners with Flock to allow police officials to search license-plate data picked up using Axon’s cameras, which are installed in more than 1,800 police cars — not where you typically imagine automated license plate reader tech to also be used. Flock’s cameras are usually depicted as being set up on stationary poles.

Meanwhile, the LAPD has indeed allowed their direct contract with Flock to expire, as was reported a few weeks ago by several publications, but police department officials had assured the Board of Police Commissioners at that July 14 meeting that the Flock-operated cameras installed around the city are still picking up footage, which means that footage and date will be available to them once their contract with Flock gets renewed. LAPD officials are in the midst of negotiating a new contract, and a draft of that contract was included in the Office of Inspector General’s report, starting on page 22. You can join the Zoom call conducted by the Office of the Inspector General here.

What just happened?

The Los Angeles Police Department has stopped posting public records online, according to a UCLA research that Libor Jany at the LA Times, in a story published Wednesday. The records — which often include recordings of dispatch calls and text messages from top LAPD officials — were being posted onto NextRequest, an online public records request management system used by several LA city departments and elected offices. UCLA professor Nicholas Shapiro, who leads a multidisciplinary team of UCLA researchers called Carceral Ecologies that studies the environmental effects of the prison system, had been tracking the records and noticed they were no longer being posted as of April. Meanwhile, Jany also reports in the story, the LAPD chief, Jim McDonnell has lamented at a recent Board of Police Commissioners meeting that they have had trouble keeping up with records requests because they do not have enough staffing.

Boyle Heights Beat’s Andrew Lopez writes about a recent community engagement effort that found that East Los Angeles residents overwhelmingly want a stronger voice in LA county government through a local community council. The engagement was being conducted by a group called LEEAF (short for Los Angeles Economic Equity Accelerator & Fellowship), and their conclusion came from summarizing conversations with 300 participants and 200 written comments. Some ideas they heard from participants included setting up either an elected or advisory local council, with the elected one seen as a step toward independence, and more control over the local Sheriff’s station. LEEAF’s interim report can be found here, and the full report is set to be submitted to LA County officials, after holding a couple more community meetings in August scheduled for the 8th and the 15th.

The progressive group, LA Forward, has endorsed Nithya Raman in the contentious mayor’s race, over Mayor Karen Bass. They said that that there was a “record-breaking turnout” of LA Forward members who cast ballots to decide on who to endorse, with 90% of their members choosing Raman. They pointed to Raman’s support of a citywide unarmed crisis response system (which creates an alternate team to send out on calls normally directed to the LAPD via 911 calls), her co-authoring of a sanctuary city ordinance, and for championing good governance reforms. They also cited her efforts to tack climate change through policy that promotes more electrification in building regulations, and her work on creating more “transportation and mobility options.” The group educates community members on how to advocate for progressive issues, regularly holds events around the city to get people civically engaged on specifically local LA city and county issues, and they do teach-ins on major political issues such as the elected County Executive in LA County. They’ve also lobbied elected officials on many issues.

A new political profile of Nithya Raman in Vanity Fair by Maxwell Adler seeks to reframe the conversation around the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Raman’s candidacy gets frequently conflated with Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialist fueled victory in New York’s mayoral race, but Adler points to the fact that Raman’s relationship with DSA has been “fractured.” This contrasts with conservative talking points that paint her as a communist, and Adler’s opening to his piece seems to capture this half-hearted engagement with reality through an anecdote about a bicyclist who, during a recent CicLAvia event, shouted “hell no to communism” as he rode up on Raman, but then neglected to stop and talk to her. Adler gets Raman to admit her relatively light touch alignment with the DSA, telling him she hadn’t joined the group out of a “deep ideological drive.” Raman said that she does “really care about issues and they were the only political organization in LA talking about renters’ rights, the only one.” Raman actually received a healthy skewering at a meeting of the Democratic Socialists’ of America-Los Angeles in March, but not quite to the degree of her opponent, Mayor Karen Bass, whose name elicited loud and ready boos at that meeting. Bass is also described often as a progressive, and she gets painted with the same blunt brush of being a communist by many in conservative circles, even though she’s also been described as abandoning her past leanings, especially after she earned the endorsement of the police officers union. That Democratic Socialist of America meeting had actually been partly held to decide if the group wanted to throw their limited capacity into the mayor’s race during the primary, but many at the meeting worried that Raman, who was framed as a “viable” progressive pick, would take resources away from getting others on their endorsed slate who were running in City Council races, and in the City Attorney’s race, which happened to be the Los Angeles chapter’s first-ever foray into a citywide race.