LOS ANGELES — After Daniel Flores secretly recorded his LAPD colleagues making racist, sexist and homophobic comments on the job, he turned the evidence over to his superiors, according to an internal affairs complaint he filed with the department last year, which said he hoped the evidence would be used against those responsible.

But now, his lawyer says, the recordings may be used in a criminal case against Flores.

The attorney, Greg Smith, told the Los Angeles Times that Los Angeles prosecutors are weighing charges against his client for allegedly violating a state law that prohibits recording conversations without the consent of those involved. Violations of the law, known as the California Invasion of Privacy Act, can be prosecuted as a misdemeanor or a felony.

Smith said Flores recently received notification that his internal affairs case had been turned over to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office for possible charges.

A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office confirmed prosecutors are reviewing the LAPD’s criminal investigation for potential illegal eavesdropping charges.

A separate administrative investigation of Flores by the LAPD found him guilty of policy violations and recommended a 20-day suspension without pay, his attorney said. The discipline has not yet been finalized by the Los Angeles Police Department chief, Smith said.

According to Smith, Flores’ defense is that, as a police officer, he had the authority to make surreptitious recordings as part of an investigation.

The conversations were taped between March and October 2024 in the city’s personnel building, near police headquarters, according to Flores’ LAPD internal affairs complaint, which detailed roughly 90 recordings of slurs and offensive remarks made by officers tasked with deciding who could join the police force.

Smith said it wasn’t clear whether any of the accused officers have been punished, but it seemed that the department was going after his client for reporting wrongdoing. LAPD policy forbids officers from retaliating against colleagues who report misconduct. California law requires most police personnel investigations to be kept confidential.

New details about the LAPD recordings made by Flores were disclosed in a lawsuit that he filed against the city in Los Angeles County Superior Court on June 12.

The suit said he joined the department in 2013 and transferred into the recruitment division in November 2021. The problems began, he claims, in late 2021 after Sgt. David Williams retired from the unit in which Flores worked.

The lawsuit says Williams’ replacement — identified in Flores’ internal affairs complaint as Sgt. Denny Jong — began making derogatory comments around the office, fostering a culture of permissiveness that allowed similar remarks to go unchecked. Jong did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday, nor did an LAPD spokesperson.

Flores “was subjected to numerous statements he considered to be derogatory towards himself and others based on race, national origin, sex/gender, and sexual orientation,” the lawsuit said.

Flores claimed he overheard his supervisor, who was Asian, remark that an “Asian invasion” had begun, before starting to recruit officers of Asian descent to the unit, according to the suit. Other times, the supervisors and unnamed colleagues made inappropriate comments about women, the suit says, referring to them as “bitches” who can’t be trusted.

Flores also claimed in the lawsuit that he heard comments about women along the lines of “they’re terrible supervisors and don’t know what they’re doing,” and implications that “they start problems.”

In another conversation described in the lawsuit, Flores said he heard his supervisor discuss the death of Dodgers legend Fernando Valenzuela from septic shock, allegedly telling subordinates that the Mexican pitcher “ate too many” tacos.

Flores alleged in the suit that the officers referred to other colleagues they believed to be queer with a slew of derogatory terms. They also referred to Black people as monkeys, the complaint said. “Black people like grape soda — they enjoy watermelon between basketball,” one was overheard saying, according to the lawsuit.

Flores said in the lawsuit that he began experiencing stress-related health problems including anxiety, dizziness, dry heaving and vomiting. After one such episode outside of the LAPD’s Ahmanson Recruit Training Center, the complaint said, he was referred to the ER by his doctor and later diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, a chronic illness with symptoms that include sharp spikes in heart rate and lightheadedness.

Flores maintains in the legal claim that his decision to begin recording his colleagues came as part of a “lawful investigation as a police officer in order to report the LAPD employees making the racist, sexist, homophobic, and other derogatory comments to Internal Affairs.”

University of California, Irvine law professor Susan Seager said the state eavesdropping law bans secret taping of confidential conversations only in situations in which there is a reasonable expectation that the communication would not be overheard or recorded.

In the case of police officers, she said, they have an expectation of privacy in non-public settings such as a locker room at their station house. It’s less clear whether such protections extend to conversations at the office that revolve around work, she said.

“Most courts say this exception only applies only to taping for criminal investigations,” Seager said.

The tipping point that led Flores to began making recordings, he said in the lawsuit, came in March 2024 when one of his female co-workers threatened to stab her colleagues with a knife she kept at her desk.

After the existence of Flores’ recordings became public last year following The Times’ reporting, the LAPD launched an internal audit to determine whether the department’s recruitment was affected, according to a May 2025 email obtained through a public records request.

In the email, Internal Affairs Sgt. Jacob Fraijo wrote a human resources employee for information about how many applicants from a “protected class” were disqualified over a yearlong period starting in February 2024. Fraijo wrote that he was also seeking information on the reasons for why each recruit was disqualified and whether any of those decisions were later overturned.

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell condemned the racist and homophobic remarks, and the police union called them “reprehensible” and “unacceptable” at a time when the department was struggling to attract new recruits.

At least five members of Flores’ unit were assigned to home pending the completion of an internal affairs probe, officials said at the time. A captain that oversaw that unit was later reassigned to run the custody services division, which runs the department’s jails.

The California law against recording “confidential communication” previously garnered attention during the 2022 L.A. City Council leaked audio scandal. In October 2022, The Times published details of a leaked, secret recording that captured crude and racist remarks made by then-City Council President Nury Martinez, then-Councilmembers Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo, and labor leader Ron Herrera.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to file felony charges in that case, saying they couldn’t determine who made the recording of the October 2021 redistricting meeting at the headquarters of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto’s office also ultimately decided against filing misdemeanor charges.

(Times staff writers James Queally and Dakota Smith contributed to this report.)

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