Long Beach Police End Use Of Self-Deleting Text Messaging App

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Officers were allegedly told to use the app to "have conversations with other officers that wouldn't be discoverable," Al Jazeera reported.

LONG BEACH, CA – The Long Beach Police Department will stop using a mobile texting application that permanently erase messages amid concerns raised by civil liberties advocates and media outlets that the app could be used to hide evidence in court cases.

The city said in a statement Tuesday evening that personnel will be barred from using the TigerConnect app on some 145 mobile devices “pending further review of whether the use is consistent with the City’s record retention policy and administrative regulations for the use of mobile devices.”

An investigative report by the news network Al Jazeera found that Long Beach Police were using the TigerConnect app, and police officers told them the confidential messaging system was used to "share details of police operations and sensitive personal issues."

Two officers claimed they were told by their supervisors to use the app to "have conversations with other officers that wouldn't be discoverable," Al Jazeera reported. LBPD denied that claim to Al Jazeera.

Records obtained by the Los Angeles Times show the department began using the app in June 2014, when Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell was still running the agency. McDonnell told the Times that the program was adopted when LBPD was looking for a replacement for its BlackBerry phones but wanted an encrypted messaging system to use in criminal investigations.

He claimed he was not aware that the application did not save messages and thought the application had been fully vetted by the city.

“Sometimes with emerging technologies we fail to recognize all the ramifications,” McDonnell told Los Angeles Times.

If given the choice, he said he would not choose to use the app again.

Long Beach has been ordered to pay several multi-million dollar settlements to the families of people killed during encounters with police in recent years. Officers were cleared by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in every case, the Press Telegram reported.

Joshua Piovia Scott, an attorney who filed a wrongful death lawsuit for the family of an unarmed college student shot by police in 2015, told the newspaper he requested police text messages as part of the discovery process and received none. A jury recently sided with LBPD in the lawsuit, and Piovia Scott filed a motion to request a new trial.

If messages relating to the case existed and the app deleted them, it could be "huge," he told the Press Telegram.

Joanna Schwartz, an expert on police litigation at the UCLA School of Law told Al Jazeera it's difficult to predict the legal problems stemming from using the self-deleting app will bring for LBPD.

"The use of Tiger Text by the police makes it more difficult to bring winning civil cases against them and effectively to defend criminal cases. The immediate question is; is this the kind of police department that the City of Long Beach wants to have?"

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