For more than a year, a digital window into the Los Angeles Police Department has been going dark: records that once appeared online almost daily have largely stopped showing up on the city’s public portal. The missing files include emergency dispatch audio and messages from top police officials, leaving Angelenos with a records system that is harder to search and a department that is already struggling to respond to requests.
The Los Angeles Times reports that new LAPD files on the city’s NextRequest portal largely stopped appearing around April 2025. UCLA professor Nicholas Shapiro analyzed more than 63,000 requests posted between 2017 and 2026 and found LAPD records made up just over one-third of them, while monthly postings fell from roughly 250 to 460 at their peak to single digits.
The change matters because the portal previously offered a searchable trail of records produced in response to public requests, including dispatch recordings, emails and text messages from high-ranking officials. Those files are used by reporters, attorneys, academics and community groups trying to understand how the department operates.
LAPD Says Its Records Unit Is Buried
The department’s own public-records guidance says records not covered by a legal exemption are available under the California Public Records Act and that access must be provided promptly. The law generally gives agencies 10 calendar days to determine whether records exist. It allows a 14-day extension in unusual circumstances, but those windows are not supposed to become an open-ended holding pattern.
The backlog appears to be getting worse as demand rises. According to the Times report, an LAPD report counted 1,860 open requests in mid-April 2026, with about 40% beyond the department’s typical two-week production window; the number of requests climbed from 3,656 in 2020 to 8,123 in 2025.
Chief Jim McDonnell acknowledged that the records unit is “grossly understaffed,” with staffing dropping from 27 employees to 17. He said LAPD was looking for ways to use technology, including artificial intelligence, to attack the backlog and could consider moving civilian employees into the unit.
A 2019 Settlement Put Transparency On Paper
The disappearance of online postings also lands against the backdrop of a 2019 settlement between LAPD, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and other plaintiffs. The ACLU SoCal settlement required a formal records policy, annual compliance audits and an online portal where the public could search requests and download records the department released.
Not posting a record online is not automatically the same as unlawfully withholding it, and the settlement does not turn every disclosure into a guaranteed website upload. But when a department stops publishing material that had been regularly available while also reporting a growing backlog, the practical result is less visibility into what is being released and how quickly.
This is not the only recent LAPD data fight. In March, another LAPD data fight kept the department’s block-level crime information off the city’s public map as outside groups challenged the handling of underlying COMPSTAT files.
For Los Angeles residents, the issue is bigger than whether a particular audio file or email is posted with a convenient download button. The city’s transparency system is supposed to show the public what police records exist, what is being withheld and why; right now, the portal is showing far less of that process than it once did.
