Los Angeles Police Protective League v. City of Los Angeles, California, et al.

California mandates that law enforcement agencies investigate formal complaints of police misconduct. To curb abuses from the filing of knowingly false complaints, California law makes it a misdemeanor to file a knowingly false complaint, and requires the law enforcement agency accepting the complaint to have the complainant read and sign an admonition informing them that filing a knowingly false complaint is a misdemeanor. Based on this Court’s recent decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, 606 U.S. 461 (2025), the California Supreme Court held that the law’s misdemeanor provision and admonition requirement constitute an incidental burden on protected speech and are therefore subject to intermediate scrutiny—rather than rational-basis review—to vacate a permanent injunction requiring the City of Los Angeles to include the admonition on its complaint forms. The question presented is: Whether the California Supreme Court erred as a matter of law in determining that a law designed to curb knowingly false complaints of police misconduct imposes an incidental burden on protected speech requiring the application of intermediate scrutiny, instead of rationalbasis review.