The claims of two of five Los Angeles police officers who say they were retaliated against after reporting that commanders allegedly enforced illegal quotas for gang contact and gun-related arrests and seizures should be dismissed, the City Attorney’s Office contends in new court papers.
The lead plaintiff is Officer Samantha Fiedler and she sued in August 2020. Fiedler and the other officers maintain in the consolidated 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, took the issues under submission and eventually ruled that all but Uribe could take their cases to trial.
But with trial scheduled for June 8, the City Attorney’s Office filed court papers with Small on Wednesday arguing that the claims of Fiedler and Fernandez should be dismissed because they were not brought before a jury within the five-year limit to do so. The judge has scheduled a hearing for May 22.
“Defendant anticipates that plaintiffs will have all manner of excuses as to why they could not bring their matters to trial within the statutory time frame, none of which will justify denial of this motion,” the City Attorney’s Office argues in its court papers while attributing the situation to the plaintiffs’ inability to manage their own trial calendars.
“The instant matters have been pending for nearly six years,” the City Attorney’s Office further states in its court papers. “Plaintiffs did not take a single deposition until November 2025 and only did so after defendant filed its motions for summary judgment.”
The summary judgment motion was the motion for dismissal denied by the judge in February.
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.