TigerText
Long Beach hired a lawyer to tell them what they wanted to hear, and for a fee, the lawyer obliged. Text messages are like phone calls?! No, of course not, and everyone knows it – at least, everyone who has ever used e-mail. Remember when the police chief said that texts were like “handwritten notes”? This comparison drew too much laughter. Now they’re clinging to the “phone call” analogy as a flotation device.
December 7, 2018 – the day that the city’s Tiger Text report was released – is a day that will live in infamy in Long Beach. On the same day, a jury awarded $2.5 million to a LBPD officer who sued the department for retaliation in a case illustrating the unbounded, petty vindictiveness of the LBPD. On the same day, former LBPD commander David Hendricks was charged with two counts of battery and a count of resisting and obstructing an officer during an altercation in August. The Tiger Text report names Hendricks (along with Lloyd Cox) as a top-level decision-maker regarding the use of ephemeral messaging in the LBPD. Some might get the impression that criminals rise in the LBPD’s ranks, approving new ways to cover up their misconduct, while good officers are punished.
Unfortunately for the LBPD and the city, larger minds than Best Best & Kreiger are confronting the implications of Tiger Text. In a lawsuit involving the use of the app at CBS, one cyber forensics expert wrote in a legal filing:
“In my matters during 16 years as an FBI agent, and three years in private practice, during which time I have interacted with dozens of companies both large and small, I have not personally observed a single company that employed an ephemeral messaging application such as TigerText for legitimate business communications by senior executives or in-house counsel.” (Source: https://www.thewrap.com/tiger-text-app-cbs/).
If the city believes that they’ve put the issues of LBPD secrecy and corruption to rest with this flimsy report, they’re sorely mistaken.
Fanny Bixby Spencer
Editor’s Note: Fanny Weston Bixby Spencer, was an American philanthropist and antiwar writer. She was the daughter of the founder of Long Beach, Jonathan Bixby, who joined the fledgling Long Beach police force in January 1908, making her one of the country’s earliest policewomen. She was born Nov. 6, 1879 and would be 139 years old, which probably means the writer is using a pseudonym.
Thank you Stephen Downing! When we heard it would be BBK hired by the City of Long Beach to conduct “an independent investigation,” we knew what we would be getting – a whitewash of faulty logic and misleading arguments. Reform!
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