LAPD is no longer majority white — but racism remains an issue
A Black police officer asked whether a monkey was named “Tyrone,” to the laughter of a roomful of Latino and Asian colleagues.
A Latina cop described how to inflict maximum pain: “You hit Black people in the liver — I heard they got weak livers,” she said, according to an LAPD internal affairs report.
The report said their boss, an Asian sergeant, stood by as his employees used terms like “midnight” and “chocolate, chocolate” to describe people’s skin tones.
Those were among the comments that came to light last year after an LAPD whistleblower secretly recorded his colleagues in a unit that screens police recruits.
The scandal, which has seen new developments in recent weeks, is forcing department officials to reckon with a harsh reality: Years of efforts to make the LAPD more diverse have seemingly done little to stamp out prejudice in the ranks.
For much of its history, the LAPD was a white man’s department. Aggressive tactics in communities of color fueled racial uprisings in the 1960s and early 1990s, when the beating of motorist Rodney King led to the discovery of messages similar to those in the recruitment unit tapes, with officers referring to Black men as “Buckwheat” and bragging about “busting heads.”
Under pressure from lawsuits and consent decrees, police leaders pushed to recruit more Black, Latino and Asian officers, seeking to build up trust in minority communities.
1. Los Angeles Police Department graduates a total of 22 recruits at the Los Angeles Police Academy in Elysian Park on Friday, September 18, 2026. 2. (Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Latinos now make up more than half of the 8,500-officer department. Black officers constitute less than 9% of the force, coinciding with a decline in the city’s Black population.
The officer who made the recruitment unit recordings, Daniel Flores, is Latino.
He recorded dozens of conversations over a six-month span in 2024, eventually handing them over to the department’s inspector general for investigation.
Last week, Flores filed a new lawsuit against the city, adding to a previous claim that alleged he faced retaliation from his bosses for documenting the offensive comments he heard while on the job.
According to his latest claim, department officials recommended that he be suspended for 22 days without pay. After initially seeking to keep his job with the LAPD, the 13-year department veteran said in the lawsuit that he recently decided to retire rather than endure an increasingly hostile work environment.
Flores also alleged LAPD officials were responsible for pushing a criminal case against him for violating a state eavesdropping law that prohibits recording conversations without consent. Initially alleging 16 felonies, Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman has since reduced the charges to misdemeanors, likely allowing Flores to avoid jail time.
An LAPD spokesperson declined to answer questions about Flores’ case.
“The Department takes these allegations seriously,” Lt. Elpidio Orozco said in a statement. “Because the case and related personnel proceedings remain ongoing, we cannot discuss individual disciplinary actions or make comparisons to unrelated past incidents.”
The department’s defenders maintain that progress has been made toward rooting out bigotry.
Officers are required to undergo psychological screening and training aimed at teasing out unconscious biases. New recruits and seasoned officers alike take field trips to the Museum of Tolerance, where trainers extol the virtues of multiculturalism. The department has sent recruiters to historically Black colleges in the South and the East Coast.
But others, including civil rights attorney Connie Rice, say the latest scandal proves that the LAPD’s problems run deeper than the hateful actions of a few individuals.
The beating of Rodney King in 1991 forced a reckoning for the LAPD.
(George Holliday / Associated Press)
“Racism is like the herpes virus in the body of the LAPD: You can suppress it with a good chief, but as soon as they leave, it breaks out again,” Rice said.
A 2024 study by British researchers examined racial attitudes among members of the department’s vaunted Metropolitan Division.
The researchers found that LAPD officers were “shockingly defensive” when asked about systemic racism, taking a negative view of diversity hiring programs and insisting that left-leaning activists, elected officials and media outlets were stoking public outrage over racial profiling.
“The dismissive reactions … to a question on such an important issue highlight an unhealthy antagonism which prevents any organization from learning or developing its practice,” the researchers concluded. “It is a fundamental barrier that must be overcome.”
While hiring more officers from historically marginalized groups has long been pushed as a way to improve police practices and build trust in minority neighborhoods, studies have not necessarily borne that out, said Daniel Gascon, a sociology and criminology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
“Just because there’s more numbers of a given sort in a department doesn’t mean it’s going to change automatically,” said Gascon, who has studied the LAPD’s relationship with Latino communities.
Since the start of the year, a review of recruit graduation announcements shows the department has hired just seven new Black officers. By contrast, roughly 80% of the 241 officers to graduate from the police academy over the last nine months have been Latino.
The growing Latino presence in the LAPD has been reflected in police use-of-force numbers.
A Times analysis of police shootings since 2016 found that of the roughly 150 people who have been shot dead by the LAPD across the city, at least 94 were Latino men. In 3 out of every 4 of those shootings, at least one of the officers who fired was also Latino, the analysis showed.
LAPD Officer Daniel Flores, left, listens as his attorney Alan Jackson speaks to reporters at the Superior Court building.
(Libor Jany / Los Angeles Times)
Despite the increased diversity, interviews with current and former LAPD members indicate deep divisions are reflected in the way that Black and Latino officers see the department’s racial issues. Most agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation.
Several Black officers told The Times they still experience workplace hostility and racial dog whistles, such as fretting about the lowering of police recruit standards. The comments, they said, came from Black and Latino colleagues alike.
Too often, the Black officers said, Latinos who wear the uniform see themselves only as victims of discrimination, and not perpetrators.
Some Black officers said they avoid conversations about race entirely for fear of upsetting conservative colleagues — who feel emboldened by the divisive rhetoric coming from the White House.
The Latino officers who spoke to The Times said the department has for too long prioritized the promotion of Black members of the force to leadership roles while the representation of Latinos in the highest ranks has slipped.
Others argue that because society tends to lump Latinos of different backgrounds together, workplace discrimination against and within the community is often missed.
Officers from both groups said their race has been used against them when it comes to promotions. But both sides also say racism is a problem in society writ large, and not limited to the LAPD.
In a recent interview with The Times, Mayor Karen Bass said that although she is pleased that the department has increased the number of Latino officers to reflect the city’s demographics, its percentage of Black officers continues to dwindle as older African Americans are on the brink of retirement with very few young Black officers coming onto the job.
Bass, who was a young community organizer in South L.A. when the King beating happened, said it was foolhardy to believe that merely because the LAPD is more diverse, old problems cannot be repeated.
“Just because this happened 30 years ago and there are new policies that were put in place, that’s not enough,” she said in an interview with The Times. “You’ve gotta make sure that those policies are constantly updated.”
Times staff writers Andrea Flores and Richard Winton contributed to this report.
