targeted

AMY Childs has broken her silence after taking time away from social media following a break-in at her £1.7million mansion.

The former Towie star, 36, addressed concerned fans after the terrifying incident last week.

Amy wrote: “I’ve taken some time away from social media recently, so thank you so much for all the lovely messages and for checking in on me. I’m absolutely fine, I promise!

“I’ve just been enjoying some time with my family, slowing down a little and, behind the scenes, I’m working on something SUPER exciting.

“I can’t wait to share it all with you very soon!”

Amy is mum to Polly, nine, Ritchie, seven, and three-year-old twins Billy and Amelia, whom she shares with her husband, Billy Delbosq, 42.

HOME HELL

Inside crime wave sweeping stars’ homes as insiders reveal Amy Childs’ U-turn

SPEAKING OUT

Amy Childs breaks silence on ‘devastating’ burglary after home was targeted

It comes after The Sun revealed that the former Towie star’s £1.7million Essex mansion had been “ransacked”.

The property is a stunning five-bedroom mansion complete with a cinema room.

The family had been enjoying a sunny holiday before returning to discover their home had been broken into.

A source told us on Tuesday: “Amy and her family returned from holiday to find that thieves had broken into her home and completely trashed the place.

“She’s absolutely heartbroken.

“She is just grateful that she and the kids were away when it happened, because it would have been terrifying if they had been there when the burglars came.

“She can’t even bear to think about that, but it’s still left her shaken.

“At the moment, she isn’t sure exactly what’s been taken as the place is totally wrecked and police have been there along with forensics.

“It’s a total nightmare and really freaked her out.”

A representative for Amy confirmed the burglary and said: “No one was hurt, which is the main thing. The police are all over it.”

Gulf and Arab governments condemn Iran over missile strike on Emirati tanker.

The United Arab Emirates has accused Iran of striking a tanker owned by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) with a missile as it crossed the Strait of Hormuz, drawing swift condemnation from Gulf and Arab governments.

The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday that the vessel was hit in the early hours of the morning while transiting the strategic waterway, a chokepoint for a large share of the world’s seaborne oil.

Abu Dhabi described the strike as an act of piracy by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and called on Tehran to halt the attacks and reopen the strait fully and unconditionally.

ADNOC confirmed one of its ships had been targeted by a missile while crossing the strait, according to the state news agency WAM. ADNOC did not provide details on any damage to the vessel or its exact location at the time of the attack.

The UAE ministry said using the waterway as a tool for pressure or economic blackmail threatened regional stability and global energy security.

The IRGC have previously threatened action against any vessels transiting the strait if they are linked to Tehran’s adversaries, or if they fail to comply with Iranian directives.

ADNOC said on Friday that it had been significantly affected by what it described as unprovoked attacks on its personnel and assets, while continuing to meet customer requirements in an “exceptionally challenging environment.”

The company said 15 of its vessels had been attacked by missiles and drones while transiting the strait since the start of the conflict, including three this week, killing one crew member and injuring 20 others. ADNOC did not identify those responsible for the attacks in its Friday statement.

Regional governments condemn attack

Gulf Cooperation Council Secretary-General Jassim Mohammed al-Budaiwi condemned the latest attack as a “dangerous and unacceptable escalation”, calling for international action to protect maritime navigation and reaffirming the bloc’s solidarity with the UAE.

Qatar also condemned the attack and rejected the use of the Strait of Hormuz as a bargaining chip, calling for the waterway to be reopened without conditions. Doha’s foreign ministry warned that its continued closure threatened the interests of regional states and the global economy.

Saudi Arabia condemned the targeting of the tanker “in the strongest terms,” saying Iran’s continued attacks constituted a grave breach of international law and Resolution 2817. Riyadh held Tehran responsible for the consequences and demanded an immediate halt to the strikes.

Jordan also condemned the attack as a flagrant violation of international law, affirming its full support for the UAE.

The reported attack marks a sharp escalation in tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, where the UAE and its Gulf neighbours have pressed for the passage to remain open to international shipping.

By almost every measure, Latino communities are bearing the brunt of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, according to a new report.

The League of United Latin American Citizens or LULAC, a Latino civil rights organization, found that court-sanctioned racial profiling has contributed to the disproportionate targeting of Latinos regardless of their immigration status.

“The impact of mass deportation is falling on Latinos as an ethnic group, not on undocumented immigrants as a legal category,” the report read in part. “U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, work-authorized immigrants, and multi-generational American families are absorbing measurable harm: economic, physical, and civic.”

Although other immigrant groups have been targeted, LULAC found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have mostly focused on immigrants from Latin America, particularly workers with no criminal history, who are also more likely to face violence or be placed in detention centers with substandard conditions.

Citing a recent UCLA study, LULAC said from January to October, federal immigration agents arrested more than 187,000 Latinos and deported more than 126,000.

Latino arrests also jumped from under 3,900 to nearly 6,000 after Stephen Miller, White House senior advisor and chief architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, set a new goal of arresting 3,000 undocumented people a day.

In an email response to The Times, a spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security rejected the report’s findings.

“Allegations that DHS law enforcement engages in ‘racial profiling’ are disgusting, reckless, and categorically FALSE,” the spokesperson wrote. “What makes someone a target for immigration enforcement is if they are illegally in the U.S.—NOT their skin color, race, or ethnicity.”

“Law enforcement officers use ‘reasonable suspicion’ to investigate immigration status and probable cause to make arrests consistent with the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” the spokesperson added. “The Supreme Court has already vindicated us on these practices.”

LULAC’s report comes amid recent court filings claiming that federal immigration agents were caught on body camera footage and in text messages using racial slurs when referring to Latinos.

Additionally, Congress recently approved nearly $70 billion in immigration enforcement funding to cover the rest of Trump’s term with at least $38 billion to go to ICE and $26 billion to Customs and Border Protection.

LULAC said in putting the report together it reviewed public data and published studies to provide a fact sheet that paints a broader picture about the impact mass deportations are having on Latinos.

“The people being removed are disproportionately working-age, employed and without criminal records — the demographic core of the workforce in construction, hospitality, agriculture, food processing, and care work,” the report read.

As of July 11, more than 65,000 people were being held in detention and about 70% of the population had no criminal convictions, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data gathering organization.

ICE detention data show that about 40% of detainees were being held for civil immigration violations including visa overstays and work visa violations.

Unless previously deported, living in the country illegally is considered a civil violation rather than a crime and carries penalties such as arrests, fines and deportation proceedings.

The indiscriminate immigration raids that terrorized Latino communities appeared to have worsened after the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in September, according to LULAC’s report.

The Supreme Court justices overturned a district court injunction that barred immigration agents in Los Angeles from roving around Home Depots and car washes, stopping brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking day laborers and others from arrest on immigration charges.

But once the injunction lifted, federal immigration agents descended once more on Latino communities, even stopping U.S. citizens, according to LULAC.

This month, the American Civil Liberties Union reviewed more than 1,200 enforcement incidents across eight states, identifying 155 U.S. citizens who were detained, targeted, or experienced law enforcement misconduct, and 437 incidents involving likely racial profiling. It also identified 214 children affected, including 32 Americans.

LULAC said the immigration raids had an economic impact. Citing a recent UCLA study, it said small business and Latino entrepreneurs in Los Angeles County saw foot traffic drop significantly, losing millions in potential revenue in June 2025.

A spokesperson for LULAC could not immediately be reached for comment.

The fate of hundreds of clean energy projects hangs in the balance after court documents revealed that the Trump administration targeted California and other blue states solely for political reasons when it slashed funding for the initiatives last year.

Large companies, startups, utilities, universities and other nonprofits were among those that lost out on $7.6 billion in clean energy funding terminated by the White House in October. They include the University of California, the California Energy Commission, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and California’s nascent hydrogen hub, the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems, or ARCHES.

At the time, Trump administration officials said the grants were terminated because they “did not adequately advance the nation’s energy needs, were not economically viable, and would not provide a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars.”

But in court documents filed as part of a lawsuit challenging the cuts, the Department of Energy states the selection of grants was “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State.”

It also concedes that neither the inclusion of ARCHES, nor any other grants in the October tranche, was “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factor.”

California and the 15 other states that lost funding did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election.

Legal experts said such an action is unheard of.

“The government has stipulated that grants were cut off to states that voted against Trump. As far as I know, this blatant politics in cutting off grants is unprecedented. It also is illegal,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School and co-counsel in the lawsuit.

More projects were cut in California than any other state, about 79 out of nearly 300. They were all for clean energy, many to address climate change, and include investments in new battery plants, upgrades for the electrical grid and initiatives to take carbon out of the air. About $1.2 billion was slated for the hydrogen hub.

Money was also to go to West Biofuels in Woodland, CALSTART in Pasadena, Charge Bliss in Aliso Viejo, Rejoule in Signal Hill, Southern California Edison, the Imperial Irrigation District and Aera Federal LLC, among many others.

The lawsuit was brought by a group of faculty members and researchers at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, who were among those to lose research grants. A separate lawsuit was filed by California and a coalition of 13 other states in February.

The acknowledgment of political motivation is “startling — and it is particularly so when the administration has had these larger narratives about how they’re canceling grants that are about waste, fraud and abuse,” said Claudia Polsky, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at UC Berkeley and initiating counsel in the university case. “If they want to favor oil, coal and nuclear, and disfavor clean energy innovation, that’s their prerogative as the executive. But here we have stipulations saying that none of those things were true for these staggeringly consequential DOE grants.”

The lawsuit alleges that the government’s actions violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which prevents arbitrary discrimination, as well as the 1st Amendment in that it is targeting researchers for how their state voted.

“None of it was about a change in priorities,” Polsky said, noting that similar grants in red states were not canceled. “None of it was about fiscal stringency. None of it was about anything except punishing people who didn’t vote for Trump.”

Judge Rita F. Lin could order the federal funding to be reinstated, and indeed has already done so through some temporary preliminary injunctions. But many of the grantees are now in “purgatory” as the case proceeds toward a final ruling, Polsky said.

Many of the projects are complex, multi-year efforts that involve a hodgepodge of agencies, experts and partnerships, such as ARCHES, the state’s billion-dollar hydrogen hub awarded under President Biden. Officials with ARCHES could not immediately be reached for comment.

News of the funding cuts first broke last fall in a post on X from Russell Vought, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being canceled,” Vought wrote. “The projects are in the following states: CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”

At a House hearing in June, however, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said decisions were not made based on politics.

The Energy Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Secretary Wright looked me in the eye, under oath, insisting the decision to cancel California’s clean energy projects was ‘not political,’” Sen. Alex Padilla said in a statement to The Times on Monday. “The Administration’s own court filings tell a different story. These decisions jeopardize good-paying jobs, undermine American energy innovation, and drive up costs.”

Padilla is among 30 California lawmakers, including Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San José), who separately challenged the funding cuts as unlawful — writing in an October letter to the Energy Department’s independent Office of the Inspector General that the decision targeted blue states “for their perceived lack of support for President Trump.” The office subsequently launched an investigation into the claims.

“Any Trump official who lied and told the nation these clean energy grant cancellations had nothing to do with politics should resign,” Schiff said in a post on X after the latest court filings were revealed. “As the administration has now been forced to concede — these cancellations had everything to do with politics. Of the worst kind.”

A final ruling is expected in early November.

Times staff writer Jaweed Kaleem contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Justice civil rights division was created in 1957 with an initial focus on combating racial inequality and protecting voting rights.

But in the first two years of President Trump’s second term, its mission has been reimagined.

Now, the division is focused on combating diversity initiatives, rolling back pro-transgender policies and rooting out allegations of election fraud.

It had for decades investigated police departments for using excessive force. Now it investigates police departments with excessive delays in approving gun permits.

California has served as the division’s laboratory for all of these changes, or, as one former civil rights staffer put it, its “punching bag.”

The civil rights division has been involved in twice as many cases in California as in any other state, according to a Times analysis of cases brought by the Justice Department.

And an examination of press statements by the civil rights division shows that California has accounted for a higher proportion of actions in the second Trump administration than during the same time period in the Biden administration.

The division is led by Harmeet Dhillon, a Californian and a conservative legal crusader, who made her name bringing legal challenges against many of the state’s institutions and once served as the chair of the San Francisco Republican Party.

More recently, she was a leading legal figure in challenges to COVID-19 mandates and has shown steadfast support for Trump; her firm represented him in his successful 2024 fight to remain on the ballot in Colorado.

The Times spoke with a dozen former attorneys in the division, nearly all of whom said that the division has taken on a more partisan approach under Dhillon’s leadership and that the changes in the second Trump administration are far more dramatic than anything that occurred during Trump’s first term.

“It is an ideological civil rights division in a way that we’ve never seen before,” said Regan Rush, the former chief of the division’s special litigation section, which largely focused on investigations into police departments and prisons.

Rush is now director of the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward, a nonprofit group that tracks the division’s activities.

In response to questions from The Times, Dhillon wrote that the division’s actions aren’t political.

“This Department speaks plainly and directly when we identify violations of federal law. Being clear about violations of federal civil rights law isn’t political or combative — it’s transparent,” Dhillon said. “I stand behind the work we’ve done since I took over the Civil Rights Division.”

While California produced President Reagan — a hero on the right who as governor frequently sparred with UC Berkeley, as Dillon does today — the state has now become, in conservative circles, a symbol of everything wrong in America.

“If there’s any state that is the antithesis of the Trump administration, it’s California,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at UC Berkeley.

Dhillon said the division brings cases wherever it sees violations of federal law.

“California is where some of the most significant violations of federal civil rights law have occurred, as our enforcement actions demonstrate,” she said.

Former attorneys in the division said the desire to target California was obvious to them.

As one example, the division has announced more than a dozen actions involving universities in California, largely focused on allegations of antisemitism — the subject of an earlier Trump executive order — at University of California campuses and alleged racial preferences in hiring in the UC system and in the admissions practices at several medical schools in the state.

The division concluded that the medical schools at UC Davis and UCLA racially discriminated against white and Asian applicants and that UCLA failed to adequately respond to complaints of antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. Other investigations are ongoing.

A pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA in 2024.

(Michael Owen Baker / For The Times)

“We were never explicitly told that California institutions are of a particular interest, but it was something that was very easy to notice,” said Ejaz Baluch, a former Justice Department attorney who worked on the employment litigation team that looked into allegations that antisemitism at UC campuses had created a hostile work environment.

Trump’s priorities

Dhillon told podcast host Michael Malice in May that she was in “constant contact” with the White House on a “daily, sometimes several-times-a-day basis.”

That represents a major shift from how the division previously operated, said her predecessor, Kristen Clarke, who was the assistant attorney general overseeing the division during the Biden administration.

“There was a fairly sturdy and necessary wall between the Justice Department and the White House,” Clarke said. “This is a complete 180.”

Dhillon has said she sees her job as enforcing civil rights law through the lens of Trump’s executive orders, which took aim at diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, immigration and pro-transgender policies, among other conservative priorities.

She said that while the division “operates within the administration’s law enforcement priorities … investigative and prosecutorial decisions, including which matters to pursue and how, are made by the Division based on the law and the facts.”

Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, said that the division’s changes under Dhillon represent a stark shift from how it operated in the past.

“It is now very much the anti-civil rights department,” Schiff said. “We’re living in this upside-down world where departments that were set up for one purpose are acting in a way that’s antithetical to the purpose of the department.”

Dhillon said that under her leadership, the division “enforces federal civil rights laws evenhandedly, on behalf of all Americans.

“That includes protecting religious liberty, Second Amendment rights, and women’s and girls’ spaces, standing against illegal race-based policymaking and DEI, and defending parents’ fundamental right to direct their children’s upbringing and education.”

Her reorientation of the division led to a mass exodus of career staff — nearly three-quarters of the roughly 400 attorneys who were there at the beginning of 2025, by Dhillon’s telling.

That’s far more departures than in the first Trump administration.

“I said, ‘My way or the highway,’ and my way isn’t my way, it’s President Trump’s way,” Dhillon told Malice.

Dhillon told The Times that the division has added 100 new lawyers and staff in the last 15 months and plans to hire 100 more.

Prisons and police

As the division has shifted its focus to align with the priorities laid out in Trump’s executive orders, it has shut down a number of cases brought during prior administrations.

Former attorneys in the division worry that other preexisting cases are languishing.

In March, the division opened an investigation into two women’s prisons in California — California Institution for Women in Chino and the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla, 35 miles northwest of Fresno — over whether they had violated the rights of other female inmates by housing transgender women in the facilities.

“There have been allegations of sexual assaults, rape, voyeurism and a pervasive climate of sexual intimidation due to the presence of males in the women’s prison,” the Justice Department said in announcing the investigation, misgendering transgender inmates.

Former attorneys in the division said that leadership also sought to open an investigation into the impact of transgender housing policies on juvenile institutions in California, but didn’t find sufficient evidence to warrant opening an investigation.

The investigation into transgender inmates at the women’s prisons came as a prior investigation into the same two prisons remains unresolved over reports from hundreds of women that they had been sexually abused by guards, even as evidence supporting the allegations mounts.

Separate from the civil rights investigation, one of the former guards at the Chowchilla facility was found guilty in January 2025 of more than 60 counts of sexual abuse of inmates and sentenced to 224 years in prison.

“We haven’t seen any kind of relief,” said Megan Marks, former deputy chief in the division’s special litigation section and the deputy director and managing editor for the Red Line for Civil Rights at Democracy Forward.

Dhillon said both investigations into the two women’s prisons are “being pursued vigorously and simultaneously.”

For the last three decades, the division has investigated allegations of police misconduct, authority it was granted by Congress after the 1991 beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers.

But in the second Trump administration, the division has closed a number of active police investigations and moved away from what Dhillon characterized to Malice as a “standing order to persecute police departments and impose nonsense restrictions on them.”

Instead, the division has brought actions against law enforcement agencies deemed to have failed to protect the rights of gun owners.

California was the first target.

The division filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit in September 2025, alleging that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had systemically denied people their 2nd Amendment rights because of long delays in approving concealed carry permits.

Last month, it filed a second gun rights lawsuit in California, this time against the state and Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, over the state’s ban on Glock pistols, which acting U.S. Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche characterized as a “blatant trampling of our rights by the California government.”

Changing tone

Former attorneys in the civil rights division say the pugnacious tone in press releases, such as the one announcing the lawsuit opposing the Glock ban, and in numerous social media posts by Dhillon announcing her intent to open investigations, represents a major shift from how the department has operated in the past.

“What really stands out more than any other civil rights division is how much they demonize and personalize,” said Christy Lopez, a former attorney in the division who is now a professor at Georgetown Law. “We tried to build rapport with the jurisdiction.”

Dhillon defended the approach she and the division have taken.

“Our job is to enforce the law and ensure compliance,” Dhillon said. “That includes public messaging to ensure the public is both aware of what the law requires and knows when others violate the law. We’ve designed our messaging strategy with this goal in mind, and we are pleased with the effect it’s had.”

Numerous former lawyers in the division also said that the current leadership has put its thumb on the scale at the outset of investigations.

“We were basically fed an answer before we conducted an investigation, which is the total antithesis of how these investigations are supposed to be conducted,” said one former Justice Department attorney who worked on the investigation into allegations of antisemitism in the UC system and requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.

Attorneys visited UC Berkeley and UC Davis, but found enough evidence only at UCLA to bring a lawsuit on claims that antisemitism created a hostile work environment.

One of Dhillon’s early top deputies, former Huntington Beach City Atty. Michael Gates, denied that politics played a role in decision-making in his time in the division.

“We evaluated every case on a case-by-case basis,” he said. “There was nothing about politics that influenced any of that.”

Gates, who left the department in November, is now the Republican candidate challenging Bonta to be state attorney general.

Dhillon said to The Times that she is “proud of the record we’ve built” and believes the division has been “active and effective.”

But its former leaders worry that with the exodus of attorneys and the changing nature of the division’s approach, it has lost the ability to fulfill its mission.

“Where does it leave the division today?” said Clarke, its former leader. “It’s a broken agency not able to adequately stand up and defend the civil rights of all Americans.”

A United Nations commission of inquiry has accused Israel of systematically targeting Palestinian children in the occupied Palestinian territory, saying Israeli actions amount to genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and war crimes in the occupied West Bank.

In a report released on Tuesday, the commission said about 30 percent of those killed in Gaza since Israel’s war began in October 2023 were children, and that attacks on maternity and neonatal units, along with an aid blockade, have devastated children’s chances of survival.

The commission says Israeli forces have destroyed orphanages and schools, and Palestinian children have been arbitrarily arrested, tortured and subjected to sexual abuse in detention. It warns that killings and serious injuries have continued even after the October 2025 “ceasefire”, in defiance of international law.

UNICEF estimates more than 50,000 children have been killed or wounded since the war began, with at least one Palestinian child killed on average every day in the eight months since the October “ceasefire” took effect.

These images document the lives and losses of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank as they struggle to survive bombardment, displacement and imprisonment – and to hold on to a future that is being systematically stripped away.

Since its creation more than a century ago, the Los Angeles Bureau of Street Lighting has been in the lamppost business and little else.

But in recent months, the little-known city agency has found itself pulled into a fierce debate over L.A.’s relationship with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that has been criticized for supplying data used to enable the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

In L.A., Flock operates dozens of automated license plate readers, which allow authorities to scan for vehicles that have been reported stolen or are registered to known fugitives, tracking their movements throughout the city.

The devices are often mounted on municipal light poles, which makes the Bureau of Street Lighting responsible for their installation.

Reports that Flock has shared license plate data with federal authorities, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have prompted dozens of mostly smaller cities across the country to end their relationship with the company. But in L.A. it still has found willing customers, including the LAPD.

Hundreds of emails obtained by The Times through public records requests reveal how LAPD boosters, homeowner associations and elected officials have engaged in a months-long campaign to pressure the Bureau of Street Lighting to speed up installations of the plate readers.

Flock, headquartered in Atlanta, said that it contracts with roughly 5,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies nationwide, and that its technology complies with a California law that limits what information can be shared with federal authorities. A company spokesperson said that Flock’s technology is “built around transparency, accountability, and local control.”

“Our customers own and control their data, which is deleted after 30 days by default,” the spokesperson, MoMo Zhou, said in a statement to The Times. “Our platform includes safeguards like audit trails to help ensure accountability at every step. Every day, Flock supports communities across the country in addressing crime and locating missing people.”

The Bureau of Street Lighting, with 177 employees and a relatively modest budget of $49.4 million, would seem an unlikely player in the broader debate over police surveillance. It is primarily tasked with repairing and fortifying the city’s more than 210,000 streetlamps — a frequent target of copper wire thieves — and maintaining its network of electrical vehicle charging stations.

The push to put up more plate readers has come amid calls for greater transparency around the Los Angeles Police Department’s dealings with Flock. In March, the Police Commission asked the department to report back on what information the company’s scanners collect and share. In recent months, the commission declined to approve donations of Flock cameras.

Members of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition held a news conference to express opposition to Flock Safety, a license plate reader, ahead of a Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners meeting on March 3, 2026.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

The commission ordered its inspector general to conduct an audit of the LAPD’s use of license plate reader technology, with the findings expected to be released in the summer.

Recently, Councilmember Ysabel Jurado introduced a motion urging the commission to “refrain from entering into any new Memoranda of Understanding, Contracts, or other Agreements, or implement any pilot programs with Flock Safety or its affiliates.” LAPD officials said last month that the city attorney’s office has been working on drawing up a formal contract with Flock.

Behind the scenes, though, the pressure to work with Flock has been ratcheting up from other council offices and community groups.

When a representative from Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky’s office emailed the streetlighting bureau urging speed, she received a response that said the installation process shouldn’t be rushed because some city light poles can’t support the weight of a Flock reader, which is normally powered by a solar panel.

“The last thing we need is to have a pole fall onto someone or something if there are high winds,” the bureau’s Clinton Tsurui wrote in the June 4, 2025, email.

In another exchange, Tsurui expressed frustration with a colleague who had offered what he thought was an overly optimistic timetable for installing new plate readers.

He wrote: “smh, promising things we can’t do is going to catch up with us one day.”

The Los Angeles Police Foundation, a nonprofit group that has long bankrolled equipment for the LAPD and offered other support, has criticized delays in installing the Flock devices. Last year, the foundation facilitated the donation of dozens of Flock cameras, most of which ended up in affluent neighborhoods on the city’s Westside and in the San Fernando Valley.

Records show that in May 2025, Dana Katz, the foundation’s executive director, reached out to the mayor’s office with a request to waive permit and rental fees associated with installing the new readers. Katz wrote in an email that the extra expense of around $2,000 per device were “cost prohibitive and detrimental to public safety.”

Katz also pointed out that in some places, there are no city-owned poles on which to mount the devices — but offered a possible solution.

“Flock has its own pole that has been accepted by the County of Los Angeles for these situations, and we would like the City to accept the use of them, too,” she wrote to Robert Clark, the city’s then-deputy mayor of public safety.

A few of L.A.’s historic streetlights stand outside the Bureau of Street Lighting’s office near Virgil Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Katz wrote Clark again on Aug. 6 to ask why officials were estimating a six-to-12-month wait for approval of new Flock readers on public property in the neighborhoods of Cheviot Hills and Brentwood Park, where there were no existing city poles to mount them. She noted that the county’s engineering department had already approved the company’s poles, and asked Clark whether there was a way for the city to “piggyback on these other entities’ approvals in order to speed this up so that these neighborhoods don’t have to wait so long for help in preventing these home invasions?”

In the following weeks, Katz’s emails took on an increasingly urgent tone. In one of her last messages, email records show, she told an aide she expected more help than the mayor’s office was offering.

“With all due respect, the answers you have provided are completely generic and do not provide any guidance and direction as to how we can expedite this process,” she wrote.

She added: “I’ve said it before, and I will say it again — these delays are harmful to public safety.”

A spokesperson for the mayor’s office told The Times that ultimately neither Clark nor the aide intervened on the Los Angeles Police Foundation’s behalf.

Email records show Flock’s courtship of the bureau dates at least to spring 2024, when the company agreed to donate two of its plate readers to help combat copper thefts.

Tsurui emailed LAPD Capt. Celina Robles to say that the company’s executives had requested an in-person meeting with the bureau and the LAPD “to discuss the benefits of this product and how it can benefit the city moving forward.”

On June 24, 2024, a lobbyist from the D.C. firm Modern Fortis emailed Bureau of Street Lighting Executive Director Miguel Sangalang seeking to “explore a public-private partnership” between Flock and the city. Sangalang took another meeting to discuss Flock a few months later with former City Councilmember Joe Buscaino, who after leaving City Hall had gone to work for Ballard Partners, a powerful Florida-based lobbying firm.

In January 2025, after wildfires devastated Pacific Palisades, Altadena and other areas, Flock stepped in again. The company agreed to donate more than 50 plate readers, free of charge for six months, to the wealthy Palisades area, where residents and law enforcement officials were on high alert about potential theft.

A Flock Safety automated license plate reader in Costa Mesa.

(Courtesy of the city of Costa Mesa)

In the days and weeks that followed, city and police officials continued to pepper the bureau about speeding up the approval process.

On Jan. 21, 2025, records show, Cmdr. Randall “Randy” Goddard of the LAPD’s Information Technology Bureau wrote streetlighting officials to say that the Palisades community “could use a big favor from your department.”

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell “fully supports this and has been working with the City Attorney’s office to finalize the terms,” Goddard wrote.