LAPD officer speaking out in lawsuit over alleged gang arrest quotas

By BILL HETHERMAN | City News Service

The lead plaintiff in a consolidated lawsuit brought by six Los Angeles police officers who allege they experienced retaliation after they spoke out about commanders’ allegedly enforcing illegal quotas for gang contact and gun-related arrests and seizures is challenging the city’s efforts to dismiss their case.

Officer Samantha Fiedler and the other officers contend in the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that management imposed career-impairing actions against them, including taking their guns and badges away and assigning them to home duty. Fiedler was the first to sue when she brought her complaint in August 2020 before all the suits were combined into one.

Fiedler, who was a member of the LAPD Metropolitan Division, contended that management for years enforced an unofficial quota system that rewarded officers who identified and arrested a lot of alleged gang members and punished those who failed to do so.

“The primary focus of my position in Metro was to acquire recap via crime suppression,” Fiedler says in a sworn declaration filed in opposition to the city’s dismissal motion. “The specific recap requested was any sort of documentation, arrest, ticket or encounter with a gang member. And the crown jewel of recap was a gang-related gun arrest.”

Fiedler says that taking an alleged gang member into custody who had a weapon was the “most favored arrest, not only because it was talked about in every roll call, but if you made that arrest, you would get emails from command staff all the way up the chain congratulating you on the arrest.”

Fiedler further says that a lieutenant told her that her promotions were heavily dependent on recap numbers.

“From that point on, it was readily apparent that promotions were largely dependent on higher recap, but not necessarily the motivation for officers to be high recappers,” Fiedler says. “Conversely, it was also readily apparent that negative employment action was enacted if you were considered a low-producing officer.”

The derisive term “coffee drinkers” or “cafecitos” was given to those officers considered by supervisors to be the low-recapping officers, according to Fiedler, who added that high-producing officers were dubbed “hard workers” or “pistoleros.”

Fiedler says she heard multiple conversations on speaker phone and in person of a Metro sergeant’s disgust with the “coffee drinkers.”

Fiedler says she recalls multiple roll call briefings throughout her time in Metro where officers were scolded for low performance and pressured to increase recap. Fiedler further says that one time when two officers spoke out about the recap pressure, she “chimed in and said that it was wrong and dangerous to push recap …”

Fiedler says that after two years in Metro she was “harvested,” or reassigned, to be a firearms instructor in 2019 and that in January 2020 she was suddenly assigned home and stripped of her police powers, including being told to turn in her guns and badge. She also says she was downgraded.

Fiedler says she later met with the sergeant who had mocked officers he considered low producers and that he told her she would lose her job and get little money from her lawsuit because she had “snitched.”

Some of Fiedler’s fellow plaintiffs were charged with deliberately misidentifying people as gang members, but a judge later dismissed the case against them. Fiedler, the daughter and sister of LAPD officers, subsequently obtained a law degree and moved out of state in order to “stay afloat financially and to find a new identity outside of the stress, retaliation and things that kick the LAPD dust back up in my life,” she says.

The other plaintiffs in the lawsuit are Officers Mario Fernandez, Julio Garcia, Rene Braga, Raul Uribe and John Walker. In their motions to dismiss the lawsuit, lawyers for the City Attorney’s Office contend there are no triable issues.

Addressing Fiedler specifically, the City Attorney’s Office maintains that Fiedler testified during a deposition that no one told her that she needed to increase the number of gun seizures she produced, or that she needed to increase the number of arrests she made.

Fiedler was assigned home in early 2020 because the LAPD had initiated an investigation alleging acts of serious misconduct related to falsification of field interview cards and shortly thereafter, the department issued a request to downgrade her, the City Attorney’s Office further states in its court papers. A field interview card is a form officers fill out to document contacts with individuals they stop or question in the field.