Essay

2025 Recap

Reflections on an awful year before the new year.

Joey Scott

31 Dec 2025 — 8 min read

Source: unknown

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It’s the butt end of 2025, the time of year when I get all reflective and take inventory of the past 365 days. What an awful year, huh?

2025 was the year of fires, smoke, and an ever-expanding police state. Mountainside wildfires, agitated by 90-mph winds, engulfed Altadena and Pacific Palisades. The smoke blocked out the sun; whatever rays poked through put a warm orange glow over the city. Then the summer arrived, and the smoke switched from wildfires to tear gas canisters thrown by police on demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles. Masked ICE agents abducted people off the streets dressed for war. All the while a billionaire in a k-hole and an administration run by authoritarians erratically dismantled the government.

This year was also the year of mass mobilization. People in LA overwhelmed wildfire victims with food and water, and others ran into the flames to rescue the people and animals left behind. When ICE showed up, so did the city. People created rapid response networks to identify ICE agents and warn their communities. Tenant unions, already organized, stood guard at the Home Depots to protect vulnerable day laborers. There are Angelenos who had never engaged in cop watching or mutual aid and are now in active solidarity with their neighbors.

If all of this can happen in a single year, then imagine what we could do in five or ten years. As a journalist, it’s my job to write about current events, but to also say that the injustice and indifference in our world doesn’t have to be this way; a better world is possible.

It was a tough year professionally. I left a co-op newsroom that I helped create with a few other idealistic journalists. For a year I dumped all my hope and energy into getting it launched, only to leave frustrated and defeated. The choice to leave the project wasn't easy, but worries about sunk costs have kept me in unproductive situations previously in my life, and I would rather not make the same mistake again.

The grief of leaving that project and the six months of adrenaline caused by the fires and an expanding police state caught up to me. The burnout was inevitable, and I spent many nights staring at my computer, trying to write something about this moment, but all I ended up with were half-baked rough drafts that I abandoned out of paralysis. I placed multiple stories at outlets, but they were either squashed for budgetary reasons or I was unable to get people to sit down for interviews because the city was experiencing various crises that demanded their attention.

Out of the failures came successes that quieted the imposter syndrome that took over later on in the year.

Taught a group of eager student journalists about FOIAs.
Attended the Investigative Reporter and Editors conference in New Orleans.
I launched my independent reporting outlet.
Did an interview for The Social Primate podcast/radio show. I did not cuss live on air like I feared. Also appeared on the Law and Disorder radio show to talk about my reporting on organized retail theft and police surveillance.

Filed over 400 FOIAs and received nearly 50,000 pages of records.
Lead a discussion about press freedoms and legal issues at a local newsroom collaboration event.
I am really proud of all the stories I wrote and published this year, and I got to work with several of my favorite news outlets.

Thank you to the editors who took my pitches and edited them into something worth reading. Thank you to the people I interviewed for your time and for trusting me with your stories or comments. Thank you to my colleagues who had each other’s backs on the ground and who are driven to make the news ecosystem in LA and California one that better represents our communities and strengthens the industry to make it more sustainable for the journalists in it. Thank you to the public records custodians I annoyed all year with my FOIAs and my lawyers who sued the ones who refused to give the records to me. And finally, thank you to the loved ones in my life who put up with my shit to support me, including Lemmy.

Below are some of my favorite stories I wrote this year. It's surreal to me that I get to, in some capacity, do the thing I love, which is journalism.

2025's Round-up

I wrote about the community response following the wildfires for Welcome to Hellworld. The piece is one of my favorites from this year, and I am honored Luke O'Neil let me publish it for his newsletter. It was one of Hellworld's top stories of the year in a year when the world felt more helllike than usual. His new book was a great read; I blew through it in a couple of weeks. That's a real achievement considering I am a slow, inattentive reader.

Covering the protests in LA took up a chunk of my summer and my mental health. I walked miles around downtown LA on the weekends, documenting another mass mobilization, this time against an oppressive government and the hardening of the city's police state. Here's a piece about the crossfire incidents between the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the LAPD, who were shot with tear gas and rubber bullets. I wrote about that for LA Public Press.

I published a few stories on the thousands of less-lethals deployed at demonstrations over the course of a couple of weeks this summer. Not only that, but I even scooped other outlets on the LAPD's failure to produce use of force reports in the timeframe required by law.

Covering the police this year kept me busy early on, including two investigations on the expanding surveillance state in California.

Looking through public records and Pasadena's Shotspotter data, I discovered the city is spending $600,000 on gunshot detection technology that sends police out to regularly find nothing. My investigation was published at LA Public Press.

Remember the "organized retail crime" hysteria that turned out to be bullshit? Well, police agencies in California ran with the crimewave fears and bought a laundry list of surveillance equipment using grant money from the state. I went through nearly a hundred grant requests from police departments throughout the state and found they were buying facial recognition software, automatic license plate readers, and social media surveillance software. I wrote about it here for The Appeal:

For LA Public Press, I went through the LAPD's liability settlement data and broke down the $400 million the city has spent since 2019 settling cases mostly involving police violence and misconduct. It's sending the city further into a budget crisis with no end in sight.

At a virtual town hall in November, Mayor Karen Bass inaccurately refuted my reporting by saying the total money spent in settlements would've bankrupted the city by now. She didn't respond to questions about her statement to clarify or retract what she said in the town hall.

Scooped this story about the LAPD defunding the city before it got to City Council before their session ended this year:

Did a TikTok and Instagram Reel about it, too:

@joeyneverjoe
The mayor and LAPD are shaking down city council for $4.4 million to cover the hiring costs of more police officers. It’s money the city doesn’t have or budgeted for, but the LAPD started hiring any way, forcing city council to look like the bad guys if they don’t pay up. #LAPD #MayorKarenBass #policeaccountability
♬ original sound - Joey Scott - journalist

I'll leave you with this fun one I wrote for LA Taco: