Daniel Flores, the LAPD officer who set off a political firestorm when he reported some of his police colleagues for making racist, sexist and homophobic comments behind closed doors, broke his silence on Tuesday.

Flores, whose only public comments had for months been filtered through his legal team, agreed to speak with The Times, detailing the toll that the prior year and a half had taken on him.

“It’s definitely been a roller coaster of a struggle,” he said. “As you know, I didn’t see this coming or turning out like this.”

Last month, L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman charged Flores with 16 felonies, alleging he violated a state eavesdropping law by secretly recording his fellow LAPD officers. The charges could have carried a sentence of 13 years in prison, but last week, after facing criticism from Mayor Karen Bass and others, Hochman downgraded the counts to misdemeanors with a diversion agreement that will probably allow Flores to avoid any time behind bars.

Internal LAPD documents reviewed by The Times raise new questions about the timing of Flores’ prosecution.

The files show that the department originally presented the case to prosecutors on July 1, 2025. Ten days later, the district attorney’s office declined to bring charges.

The case sat dormant for about a year, before Flores filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the city in L.A. County Superior Court, alleging he faced retaliation for speaking out about misconduct. Less than three weeks later, the district attorney’s office announced that it would move forward with the prosecution.

Flores and his attorney allege the case was further retaliation for his decision to file a lawsuit.

On Tuesday, the district attorney’s office said that it didn’t pursue charges against Flores in July 2025 because it lacked the evidence to “definitely establish” that he had made the recordings and sent the case back to the LAPD for further investigation.

“That changed when Flores filed his own civil lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles,” the office said in a statement. A spokesperson said that even though Flores had admitted to making the recordings, the LAPD didn’t release that information to the district attorney until after Flores filed his lawsuit.

Hochman said last week that he wanted to thread the needle between punishing the illegal recording and not dissuading whistleblowers from coming forward.

“If you go ahead and illegally eavesdrop in our community, you will face criminal prosecution for doing it, so don’t take out your cellphones and or your smart glasses or anything else,” he said, while encouraging whistleblowers to work with the district attorney’s office to gather evidence in the future.

Flores told The Times that he initially filed an anonymous Internal Affairs complaint against members of his LAPD unit in February 2025. Flores worked in a recruitment division, which handles job applications from aspiring officers.

According to Flores’ complaint, he heard officers make jokes and racial comments about Black candidates who interviewed for the department, focusing on their “failures and adverse histories, which prevented them from being hired as Los Angeles Police Officers.”

LAPD Officer Daniel Flores, left, listens as his attorney Alan Jackson, center, speaks to reporters at the Superior Court building in downtown Los Angeles this month.

(Libor Jany / Los Angeles Times)

A few days after filing the complaint, he said, he received a call from Internal Affairs investigators who notified him that someone had accused him of making racist remarks. Flores vehemently disputes this, saying that it was clearly an attempt to discredit him. When he reached out to the police union for legal representation, he said, he was told that there was a conflict of interest because one of the union’s attorneys was already representing some of the accused officers.

Ten days after filing his anonymous complaint, he submitted a letter to the inspector general’s office, along with a USB drive with the 122 recordings, which he’d made over a span of about six months.

According to Flores, he began surreptitiously recording his colleagues after their inappropriate commentary got so bad that one day a police lieutenant warned them that if they continued, they would “bring down the whole department.”

Flores said he taped his fellow officers making racial slurs, along with homophobic and sexist comments. In one conversation about Latino immigrants, a colleague was heard saying, “F—ing deport them, call ICE.”

Flores’ attorney Greg Smith said that his client tried to report misconduct by going through the proper channels but still ended up being targeted by the department and, later, prosecutors.

“He was trying to fix things, not trying to create publicity or any kind of public outrage,” Smith said.

Almost from the outset, it appeared as though the outcome of the department’s investigation into the allegations was “predetermined,” according to Flores. Investigators assigned to the case were asking some of the accused officers leading questions, which seemed designed to soften their actions, he said.

“I know from the beginning that they were going to try to swing the investigation, and I knew from the beginning that they were going to try to come after me,” Flores said.

California is a “two-party consent” state, meaning it is a crime for someone to record a conversation without the permission of other participants, unless there is a court order granting authority to do so. Flores’ attorneys have argued that his actions were allowed under the California Invasion of Privacy Act because he was acting in the course of his duties as a police officer.

Flores has kept his job with the LAPD since filing the initial complaint and facing criminal charges, but remained away from the department on medical leave.

He described the months since the complaint became public as “painful” and isolating.

“No cop will talk to me at all,” he said. No one from the department has reached out to check on him since the scandal broke; he suspects it’s because people are worried about getting entangled in his criminal or civil cases.

“The things I see on the internet: The other cops are calling me rat, snitch, [saying], ‘Snitches get stitches,’” he said. He recalled one Facebook post, made by a current LAPD officer, that drew scores of comments from officers criticizing him.

“It’s hurtful, because the people who are calling me rat and snitch, they’re all officers,” he said. “The people on my side, they’re all citizens.”

He was reluctant to report the wrongdoing, he said, because one of the lieutenants had boasted that he knew a lot of people in Internal Affairs.

He said that during his time with the department, he had heard of other reports of wrongdoing that ended up going nowhere. The conversations he recorded were “apparently normal for the LAPD,” he said.

“When I brought it to their attention, I think the reason they retaliated against me as much as they did was because there was evidence, so it was no longer to be under the table,” he said.

Asked whether he regretted coming forward at all, Flores paused before saying that he did.

“I do because it ruined everything, it ruined my life,” he said. “My face is all over the internet. They painted me as the criminal. They didn’t even care about the bigotry, they just painted me as the criminal.”

A NASA-led team is hoping to take a short cut in directly imaging extrasolar earthlike planets. The idea is to use what they term a hybrid telescope composed of an orbital starshade coupled with the next generation of extremely large ground-based optical telescopes.

Positioned some 175,000km away in an elliptical Earth orbit, the starshade would likely first be used in conjunction with the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope, now scheduled to see scientific first light in northern Chile by late 2030.

The starshade would block out the parent star’s light to enable directly imaged optical observations of nearby solar systems and rocky earth-sized worlds. That is, planetary systems all located within some twenty light years of Earth.

Dubbed the Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets (HOEE), the team has already applied for Phase B NIAC (NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts) funding that they hope to see granted by 2027.

Current direct imaging space instruments, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near Infrared Camera and NASA’s planned Roman Space Telescope’s Coronagraph Instrument, are unable to directly observe earth-like exoplanets, write the authors of a 2026 paper appearing in the journal Nature Astronomy.

We need to go for something that is more efficient and available now; a hybrid observatory that can observe the exoplanetary system in optical light, Vladimir Airapetian, a senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and a HOEE project team member, told me in Paris.

The challenge is to block light from the star in order to reveal a planet that in optical light would be a billion times fainter than the star itself. To do that, the starshade would create an artificial eclipse to occult the parent star’s light to allow ground-based observers to receive reflected light directly from the extrasolar planet.

Dubbed an occulter, the starshade would likely feature 48 petals, each 24.5-m long, and a 50-m-diameter central disk, note the Nature Astronomy paper’s authors. The starshade would also be capable of being repositioned within six meters of accuracy, using some sort of microthrusters, most likely powered by hot hydrogen gas.

Our team proves that by deploying a starshade to cast a “perfect shadow” over Earth’s largest telescopes, HOEE can suppress stellar glare before it ever enters the atmosphere, says Airapetian.

The starshade would hover directly on the line of sight between the ground telescope and the target star, offering continuous fine alignment on the celestial target, Mather has written in a previous presentation. The concept relies on a long elliptical astro-stationary orbit to match Earth’s rotation, using chemical propulsion for station-keeping and solar electric propulsion for retargeting, Mather has noted.

HOEE’s much sharper images would also allow astronomers to see entire exoplanetary systems and to clearly separate planet images from other earth-sized planets and the host star itself. This hybrid telescope’s extreme sensitivity would in principle enable the detection of an exoearth within the first minute of observation.

HOEE would also enable a definitive path to identifying the chemical signatures of life.

Airapetian wants to find active stars that are flaring frequently enough to create extrasolar auroras on rocky planets orbiting solar-type F, G, and K stars. These would ideally be stars in their first billion years on the hydrogen-burning main sequence. The idea is to look for potential exoearths circling other sun-like stars that might have either precursors of life or primitive life.

An illustration of LHS 1815b, an ancient rocky exoplanet orbiting a star in the galactic thick disk. Image Credit: NASA

We’re going for the spectral lines from red and green auroras that would signal that the atmospheres of these planets can support nitrogen and oxygen, says Airapetian.

As for projected costs and the final design?

Airapetian says it would clock in around the billion-dollar range. And the final occulter design would likely involve an inflatable structure to keep the total launch mass under 1,500 kg. The idea is that the starshade would efficiently collapse into a standard launch vehicle’s payload, Mather has written.

The Bottom Line?

For decades, the starshade was a beautiful but “impossible” dream, says Airapetian. Today, through NASA funding, that dream is becoming a buildable reality, he says.

Sources:

Vladimir Airapetian

John Mather

Nature Astronomy