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Lego heads: Murrieta Police Department's (California) innovative strategy to protect suspects' identities

The police decided to use Lego heads to comply with Assembly Bill 994 & Penal Code 13655, which prohibits them from publishing images of those allegedly guilty of minor crimes.

Imagen proporcionada por el Departamento de Policía de Murrieta, en California, con sospechosos tapados con cabezas de Lego.

(Murrieta Police Department)

Published by
Rosana Rábago Sainz

The Murrieta Police Department (MPD), in California, has gone viral. The reason is due to its innovative strategy to protect suspects' identities and comply with the state regulations that went into effect on January 1. The law prevented them from publicly posting the faces of those suspected of minor crimes. Because of this, they decided to replace the suspects’ faces with Lego heads. The department explained its tactic on its Facebook profile once the photos started to go viral:

Lego asks the Murrieta Police Department to stop

However, the toy company is not pleased with the measure and even asked the department to stop using the easily recognizable heads of its toys to comply with the law. Lieutenant Jeremy Durrant told the Washington Examiner that the Lego Group had contacted the department and asked them to stop digitally adding Lego heads to the photos.

There is still no official statement from the company. However, an MPD spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the department had been using Lego faces to hide the faces of some criminal suspects long before the law went into effect:

In the interest of keeping our residents updated on public safety events in our community while, at the same time, respecting the new regulations, we’ve been obscuring the faces of suspects in our social media posts in various ways. We’ve been doing this for the past couple of years, and it’s nothing new to us.

A simple search on the department's social media shows that the department has been doing this for quite some time and not just with Legos. They have also used images of characters like Shrek, Barbie or emojis, among others:

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