Politics > Law Enforcement

The Day My Department Stopped Being a Department

Thirty years of shifting priorities and culture has wrecked police departments across the country.

Clark Baker | May 30, 2026

In 1995, as a Valley Traffic Division motorcycle enforcement officer in Van Nuys, I noticed something that bothered me about how the press covered the Los Angeles Police Department.  The reporters were not lying, exactly.  They were doing what reporters do: taking the department’s official statement, taking a critic’s statement, splitting the difference, and printing the result.  The problem was that the department’s side of the story arrived at the newspaper through a small communications office, got compressed into two or three sentences, and then competed with whatever the loudest critic of the week had to say.  The public read the result and concluded that the department was either hiding something or was incapable of explaining itself.  Often it was the second.

There was an obvious fix.  The department could speak for itself, directly, in its own words, without a middleman, twenty-four hours a day, to anyone in the world who wanted to read it.  The technology to do this had just arrived.  It was called the World Wide Web.

I did not ask for permission.  I obtained server space through a private consulting firm I ran on the side, donated it to the department, and built a Valley Traffic Division website at thrutraffic.com/vt.  Julie Tamaki at the Los Angeles Times wrote it up.  Other LAPD officers and other departments began calling to ask how to do the same thing.  I helped several U.S. and international agencies put up their own sites before the responsibility for police internet work was eventually transferred to a thirty-person office that did not exist when the work started.

The story is not about me. It is about what was possible inside the LAPD in 1995, and what is no longer possible inside the LAPD in 2026.

In 1995, a commanding officer could look at his patrol officer’s side project,........

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