The Long Beach Police Department presents a substantial Brady/Giglio concern because its misconduct history includes the use of a self-deleting communications platform for official police business, thereby impairing public records access, defense discovery, impeachment review, civil-rights litigation, and court oversight. In 2018, reporting and civil-liberties review revealed that LBPD had used TigerText, also known as TigerConnect, a messaging application that automatically deleted messages after a set period. The City of Long Beach then announced an independent outside review of the department’s use of that messaging application, and the police chief suspended its use.
The constitutional problem is not merely administrative. When sworn officers use disappearing-message systems for official police communications, they create a structural evidence-destruction risk. The ACLU of Southern California reported that LBPD’s use of TigerText had been kept secret for years, that the issue came to light only because of a whistleblower, and that government use of self-deleting messages reduces the public’s and litigants’ ability to know about and challenge the policing systems imposed upon them. The Los Angeles Times likewise reported that LBPD suspended use of the application after concerns were raised that the app could hide evidence useful to opposing parties in criminal and civil cases.
The Brady/Giglio significance is direct. Officer communications about stops, arrests, force, searches, surveillance, investigative strategy, witness handling, informants, charging recommendations, and report drafting can contain exculpatory evidence, impeachment evidence, inconsistent statements, bias evidence, or evidence of improper motive. Under Brady v. Maryland and Giglio v. United States, prosecutors must disclose favorable evidence and impeachment material. Under Napue v. Illinois, the prosecution may not allow materially false or misleading testimony to stand uncorrected. Under Kyles v. Whitley, police-held impeachment and exculpatory evidence is attributable to the prosecution for disclosure purposes. A police department cannot defeat those duties by using internal communications systems that cause potentially material records to disappear before prosecutors, defense counsel, courts, or oversight bodies can review them.
The scale of the communication issue aggravates the concern. The Investigative Reporting Program’s Accountability Journalism Initiative reported that documents obtained from LBPD showed that officers had used the application for more than four years and that hundreds of thousands of messages sent while on duty were destroyed. CheckLBPD later reported that Long Beach police used TigerText for almost four years and sent 261,799 messages, while oversight actors failed to make the necessary public-records or discovery determination before the communications disappeared. Whether any given deleted communication would have been exculpatory cannot be resolved after the fact where the deletion system itself prevented preservation.
For Brady List purposes, the Long Beach Police Department should therefore be treated as an agency requiring heightened Brady/Giglio scrutiny. The relevant misconduct involves the integrity of the evidence system itself: official police communications were routed through a disappearing-message platform, creating foreseeable loss of discoverable material and undermining defense access to officer communications that could bear on credibility, bias, motive, false reporting, use of force, search justification, or investigative misconduct.
Accordingly, any prosecution relying on Long Beach Police Department witnesses, reports, arrests, traffic stops, use-of-force narratives, surveillance evidence, search-and-seizure records, probable-cause statements, officer observations, informant handling, or investigative conclusions should require affirmative Brady/Giglio disclosure. Prosecutors should disclose all officer-specific impeachment material, all TigerText/TigerConnect policy records, all contracts and invoices, all preserved message metadata, all communications-retention records, all internal-affairs and disciplinary materials concerning disappearing-message use, all public-records compliance reviews, and all affected-case reviews. Until that showing is made, LBPD-related testimony and evidence should be treated as presumptively requiring enhanced credibility scrutiny rather than ordinary reliance.
