Five of six Los Angeles police officers who say they experienced retaliation after speaking out about commanders allegedly enforcing illegal quotas for gang contact and gun-related arrests and seizures can move forward to trial with their claims, a judge has ruled.
The lead plaintiff is Officer Samantha Fiedler. She and the other officers contend in the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that management imposed career-impairing actions against them, including taking their guns and badges away and assigning them to home duty. Fiedler was the first to sue when she brought her complaint in August 2020 before all the suits were combined into one.
The other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Officers Mario Fernandez, Julio Garcia, Rene Braga, Raul Uribe and John Walker. On Feb. 13, Judge Michael Small heard the city’s motion to dismiss all claims by all plaintiffs. He took the issues under submission and ruled Monday that all but Uribe can take their cases to trial.
“Their evidence shows that the LAPD targeted them because they either had spoken out against LAPD policy on inflating gang statistics or because the LAPD believed that they would speak out,” the judge said of the plaintiffs’ arguments.
In Uribe’s case, his evidence of Board of Rights proceedings against him and referrals of him to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office for possible criminal prosecution, both actions that he alleged were retaliatory, were not in his lawsuit and therefore the city is entitled to dismissal of his claims, Small found.
Fiedler, who was a member of the LAPD Metropolitan Division, contended in a sworn declaration that management for years enforced an unofficial quota system that rewarded officers who identified and arrested many alleged gang members and punished those who failed to do so.
“The primary focus of my position in Metro was to acquire recap via crime suppression,” Fiedler said. “The specific recap requested was any sort of documentation, arrest, ticket or encounter with a gang member. And the crown jewel of recap was a gang-related gun arrest.”
Fiedler said that taking an alleged gang member into custody who had a weapon was the “most favored arrest, not only because it was talked about in every roll call, but if you made that arrest, you would get emails from command staff all the way up the chain congratulating you on the arrest.”
Fiedler further maintained that a lieutenant told her that her promotions were heavily dependent on recap numbers.
“From that point on, it was readily apparent that promotions were largely dependent on higher recap, but not necessarily the motivation for officers to be high recappers,” Fiedler says. “Conversely, it was also readily apparent that negative employment action was enacted if you were considered a low-producing officer.”
Fiedler said she remembered multiple roll call briefings in Metro when officers were scolded for low performance and pressured to increase their arrest numbers. Fiedler further said that one time when two officers spoke out about the recap pressure, she “chimed in and said that it was wrong and dangerous to push recap.”
Fiedler says that after two years in Metro she was “harvested,” or re-assigned, to be a firearms instructor in 2019 and that in January 2020 she was suddenly assigned home and stripped of her police powers, including being told to turn in her guns and badge. She also says she was downgraded.
Some of Fiedler’s fellow plaintiffs were charged with deliberately misidentifying people as gang members, but a judge later dismissed the case against them. Fiedler, the daughter and sister of LAPD officers, subsequently obtained a law degree and moved out of state in order to “stay afloat financially and to find a new identity outside of the stress, retaliation and things that kick the LAPD dust back up in my life,” she said.
The City Attorney’s Office maintained that Fiedler testified during a deposition that no one told her that she needed to increase the number of gun seizures she produced or that she needed to increase the number of arrests she made.
Fiedler was assigned home in early 2020 because the LAPD had initiated an investigation alleging acts of serious misconduct related to falsification of field interview cards and shortly thereafter, the department issued a request to downgrade her, the City Attorney’s Office further stated in its court papers.
A field interview card is a form officers fill out to document contacts with individuals they stop or question in the field.
Trial of the case is scheduled for March 23.