By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, December 2012
In early December 2012, NBC LA investigative reporter Ana Garcia ran a story on illegal animal-trafficking arrests in downtown LA. LAPD media-relations chief Robbi Peele then sent an internal email about the story that, through a reply-all chain, ended up being forwarded to Garcia herself. The original FishbowlLA piece documented the recursive media-relations failure: an LAPD comms chief criticizing an investigative reporter via internal email that the reporter then received.
Then
Garcia’s NBC LA story had focused on a downtown LA animal-trafficking operation that the LAPD had finally arrested suspects in. The reporting was part of her Get Garcia investigative-series brand at the station, which had been running ongoing local-government and law-enforcement accountability stories.
Robbi Peele’s internal email to LAPD media-relations staff had been intended for internal circulation. Through a reply-all chain that included a recipient who had been added at some point, the email had eventually been forwarded to Garcia. The contents of the email — characterizing the story and the reporter — became part of the documented record once Garcia got hold of it.
The original FishbowlLA framing — Richard Horgan’s pickup — captured the structural absurdity. LAPD media-relations was, in the early 2010s, an institutionally well-resourced operation; reply-all chains causing internal commentary about a reporter to reach the reporter herself was exactly the kind of unforced-error that the operation was meant to prevent.
Now
The broader category of LAPD media-relations and the press’s documentation of how it operates has been substantially expanded across the decade and a half since 2012. The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, the various subsequent use-of-force investigations, and the ongoing LAPD reform discussions have all produced new layers of media-relations infrastructure at the department.
Ana Garcia continued at NBC LA for years after the 2012 episode and has continued in investigative-reporting roles across LA-area broadcast journalism. Her Get Garcia franchise has been one of the durable local-investigative TV brands of the post-2012 LA news landscape.
The animal-trafficking arrests that the original story documented were part of a broader pattern of LA-region illegal-wildlife-trade enforcement that has continued across the decade. The downtown LA bunny-trafficking specifically is no longer an active case, but related illegal-pet-trade enforcement has remained a continuing LA County / California Fish and Wildlife matter.
The reply-all-email failure mode the 2012 piece captured remains one of the most-cited media-relations cautionary tales in LA-area public-affairs training literature. It is a small documented moment when institutional comms structures collapsed in a public, recoverable way.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.