The LA Times reported this week that the then-LA County Sheriff's Department – there has since been a change in sheriffs – "urged the state attorney general to prosecute" Lau, this after a seven-year investigation that began back in 2017 at the order of then-Sheriff Jim McDonnell.
McDonnell's team launched a probe for answers as to who leaked the list, which contained about 300 names, to Lau. That probe quickly lost steam but was resurrected in 2018 after Alex Villanueva's office took over the case, this according to a recently unearthed 300-page investigative file.
Lau was classified by the sheriff's department as a criminal suspect for allegedly receiving "stolen property," aka the bad cop list. Diana Teran, the department's constitutional policing advisor, was later identified as the leaker even though she was the one who reported it in the first place. Teran vehemently denies any involvement.
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New LA sheriff says cops don't "monitor journalists;" they "respect the freedom of the press"
A few years pass and 2021 arrives, bringing with it a transfer of the case to Attorney General Rob Bonta. Bonta's office declined to prosecute Lau back in May, citing "insufficient evidence."
"I'm glad this investigation is over, and it's an outrage that the sheriff's department would criminally investigate me as a reporter for doing my job," Lau commented back in 2021 after the case was dropped.
"It's the kind of action that's aimed at intimidating journalists from digging into government agencies."
The department issued a comment about the case more recently stating that under the leadership of Sheriff Luna, anyway, "we do not monitor journalists and we respect the freedom of the press."
As a journalist, added David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, Lau is immune from the type of attempted prosecution that LA's old sheriff allegedly tried to execute against Lau.
"You're not authorized to break into a file cabinet to get records," Snyder said. "You're not authorized to hack computers, but receiving information that somebody else obtained unlawfully is not a crime. Publishing that information is protected under the First Amendment."
The leaked records in question date all the way back to 2014 when Teran worked at the Office of Independent Review. At that time, she was compiling a Brady List of officers with a history of disciplinary problems, relying on information from both the district attorney's office and sheriff's department databases.
In late 2014, Teran stopped adding new names to the list because she believed the sheriff's department had started to maintain its own list. One year later, Teran joined the sheriff's department as a constitutional policing advisor, after which she came to the realization that Lau and other reporters were inquiring about deputies on the Brady List.
Teran was suddenly concerned, based on these developments, that her list had been leaked. After accessing public records requests, Teran learned that there were striking similarities between her list and the reporters' list.
AG Rob Bonta's office then received the case in 2021, only to drop it rather promptly.
"A criminal with a badge is still a criminal," one commenter noted about the critical importance of rooting out bad cops from law enforcement.
More related news about problems with government can be found at Corruption.news.
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