The LAPD has quietly stopped putting many public records online

This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.

Set us as preferred Nicholas Shapiro, a professor at UCLA, was scrolling the city of Los Angeles’ online data portal one day this spring when he noticed something odd.A trove of Los Angeles Police Department records that were once regularly posted online was suddenly nowhere to be found.The records — everything from audio recordings of emergency dispatch calls to the emails and text messages of high-ranking police officials — were seemingly no longer being published on NextRequest, the city’s records portal.Such records had previously been posted online almost daily in response to records requests from members of the public.According to Shapiro, who published a research brief on the topic, new files stopped appearing around April 2025.

Other city agencies continued releasing their records as normal, he said.The records on NextRequest once offered a vital window into the inner workings of the historically opaque Police Department, Shapiro said.By taking them down, he said, the LAPD had turned into even more of a “black hole of information.”“The LAPD is supposed to be the cornerstone of accountability for the city and you can see that it is is clearly failing to uphold that mission when it comes to transparency,” Shapiro said.An LAPD spokesperson said the department could not immediately respond a request for comment on Tuesday.Postings of records requests submitted by the public to the LAPD also largely stopped last April, when they declined from 250 to 460 a month at their peak to single digits, according to Shapiro’s research brief.

Shapiro, director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at UCLA, said he analyzed more than 63,000 requests available on NextRequest.LAPD records accounted for just over a third of all the requests, which were made between 2017 and 2026.Department watchdogs argue that public records...