A group of six law enforcement officers who are members of the Los Angeles Police Internal Affairs group (IAG) have filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles over so-called “whistleblower retaliation.”

The IAG is an “investigative arm of the Chief of Police to identify and report corruption and employee behavior that tends to discredit the Department or filing a Department policy, procedure or practice”

The six plaintiffs say they were victims of whistleblower retaliation when they were improperly reprimanded during a dispute centering on nepotism within the upper levels of the department as well as unlawful activities that allegedly took place.

These six law enforcement officers say that they were specifically targeted because a deputy chief felt that they would speak out in support of a colleague who was vocal about the alleged improprieties that were taking place within the department.

Plaintiffs Ricardo Ortega, Rick Harris, Andrew Garcia, Sylvia Casas, Rosalie Garcia and Efrain Flores filed the whistleblower retaliation lawsuit in late November in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The plaintiffs are seeking damages in an unspecified amount as well as an injunction that would prevent the Los Angeles Police Department from taking similar alleged illegal actions against employees in the future.

The lawsuit states that IAG Sgt. Cathy Marx filed several reports to the Office of the Inspector General, which oversees the internal disciplinary processes within the department.

Marx told the IAG that a police captain committed perjury and requested that an investigation be opened. This allegedly took place in October 2013, according to the whistleblower retaliation lawsuit.

Approximately two months after Marx filed her initial report, she filed another report saying that a different police captain told her to remove parts of an official log that recorded dates on which actions were taken with respect to a particular investigation, the whistleblower retaliation lawsuit states.

Marx said that in March 2014, Chief of Police Charlie Beck’s daughter sold her own personal horse to the mounted unit of the loss Angeles Police Department, which was a violation of the Los Angeles Municipal Code, according to the lawsuit.

Eight months later, Marx said that she “reported to her superiors that the chief of police had an alcohol problem” and that a group of officers at a gentlemen’s club called the Saddle & Sirloin Club, where Marx said Chief Beck and his friends were “passing around naked pictures of their girlfriends and then drove city vehicles while intoxicated,” the allegations state.

Rather than launching an investigation of the command staff officers and appropriately filing complaints, Marx alleged that the deputy chief in charge of IAG “launched an investigation around certain employees assigned to Internal Affairs under the belief these employees would support the allegations of unlawful activities… made by Marx,” the whistleblower retaliation lawsuit reads.

The complaint goes on to state that the deputy chief required audits of the Complaint Management System that was used by the plaintiffs “in an attempt to ensnare members of Internal Affairs that McCarthy believed could testify favorably for Marx or unfavorably against any command officer accused of unlawful activity and/or nepotism.”

After the audit, Marx states the plaintiffs were reprimanded “in an attempt to discredit or simply frighten them so that they could not testify favorably for Marx or about the unlawful activities.”

The six officers will lose overtime pay as well as pension pay as part of the punishment, and it would negatively impact the officers’ ability to promote, the lawsuit claims.

It also alleges that many complaints filed by Marx were reported by a blogger who was followed by many of the LAPD brain-and-file officers, but no investigations were launched despite the content of the articles, the whistleblower retaliation lawsuit states.

In October 2014, Marx filed her own lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and it is currently pending trial.

In this lawsuit, she alleges that after she came forth with her various complaints against the command staff officers, she was “removed from a coveted position… to a position of low importance essentially relegated to reading mail generated by mentally unstable people concerning perceived wrongs caused by the police department.”