(TNS) — Nicholas Shapiro, a professor at UCLA, was scrolling the city of Los Angeles’ online data portal one day this spring when he noticed something odd.
A trove of Los Angeles Police Department records that were once regularly posted online was suddenly nowhere to be found. The records — everything from audio recordings of emergency dispatch calls to the emails and text messages of high-ranking police officials — were seemingly no longer being published on NextRequest, the city’s records portal.
Such records had previously been posted online almost daily in response to records requests from members of the public.
According to Shapiro, who published a research brief on the topic, new files stopped appearing around April 2025. Other city agencies continued releasing their records as normal, he said.
The records on NextRequest once offered a vital window into the inner workings of the historically opaque Police Department, Shapiro said. By taking them down, he said, the LAPD had turned into even more of a “black hole of information.”
“The LAPD is supposed to be the cornerstone of accountability for the city and you can see that it is is clearly failing to uphold that mission when it comes to transparency,” Shapiro said.
An LAPD spokesperson said the department could not immediately respond a request for comment on Tuesday.
Postings of records requests submitted by the public to the LAPD also largely stopped last April, when they declined from 250 to 460 a month at their peak to single digits, according to Shapiro’s research brief.
Shapiro, director of the Carceral Ecologies lab at UCLA, said he analyzed more than 63,000 requests available on NextRequest. LAPD records accounted for just over a third of all the requests, which were made between 2017 and 2026.
Department watchdogs argue that public records allow residents to evaluate how the LAPD and other agencies are performing and look for ways to improve. Commonly used by journalists, lawyers, academics and advocacy groups such as the ACLU, public information can be requested by anyone under the California Public Records Act.
Once an agency receives a request, it must respond within 10 days, saying whether the information exists and can be released. Officials must also disclose whether they intend to withhold any requested records and give statutory or legal reasons for doing so. But once an agency decides records are public, the law states, it must release them “promptly.”
The law allows agencies to make some exceptions if there are “unusual circumstances,” giving them an additional 14 days, at most, to respond.
Even before the LAPD’s records stopped being posted, Shapiro said he found that the department was consistently slower than any other city agency in fulfilling the requests it received and more likely to have requests stretch far beyond “the typical response time.”
Some department observers have accused the LAPD of abusing the “unusual circumstances” exception, sometimes for months at a time.
Local government agencies are not obligated to post public records online, with a few exceptions, according to David Loy, legal director at the nonprofit First Amendment Coalition.
No longer posting records that were previously made available “may not be technically illegal, but it’s certainly not a best practice,” he said.
Shapiro said he became familiar with NextRequest while using it to request records as part of a years-long study on the environmental and health effects of low-flying police helicopters. It’s now impossible to determine whether such records are being released because the department is assigning the vast majority of requests with the catch-all label “Closed – Other.”
“It’s this shrewd way that they’re protecting their information and eluding public oversight,” Shapiro said.
Speaking at a Police Commission meeting earlier this month, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell acknowledged delays in producing records, saying that the unit tasked with reviewing and releasing the information is “grossly understaffed.”
McDonnell said the department was “looking for opportunities” to leverage technology such as AI to address the backlog, and suggested the possibility of redeploying civilian staff to the unit.
With recent departures, the number of employees responsible for processing most records requests has dropped to 17 employees from 27, officials said.
An LAPD report released earlier this year found that as of mid-April, the department had a total of 1,860 open records requests.
About 40% of the requests had gone beyond the two-week window by which the records should typically be produced. The report said the number of requests had more than doubled from 3,656 in 2020 to 8,123 in 2025, with the largest surge coming over the last two years. State laws now require police departments to release more information about officer misconduct and cases that involve serious uses of force.
Adding to the backlog, some LAPD officials warn, are chronic requesters who flood the department with complex and time-consuming inquiries, all of which have to undergo several levels of review to avoid the release of private data.
Over the first four months of this year, the department received 3,282 requests, up from the same time in 2025.
“This rapid escalation has outpaced current staffing capacity, leaving the Department stretched to meet the demand,” the LAPD report said.
Each year, the department faces lawsuits cataloging records inquiries that the LAPD failed to respond to by the 10-day or 24-day deadline. Several suits have led to payouts.
Under a settlement agreement stemming from one such court challenge by the ACLU and others, the department agreed to adopt a formal records release policy and conduct annual audits for compliance.
© 2026 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
