Oh, snap!
Lego has come down on a California police department like a ton of bricks — albeit politely — asking it to stop adding digital toy heads on suspects’ faces, which it has been doing to comply with a woke state law protecting offenders’ rights.
Murrieta police went viral for posting hilarious images with suspects’ faces replaced by Lego heads after the state Legislature passed a bill prohibiting the release of mugshots and booking photos of those accused of nonviolent crimes.
But the toy giant is not playing around and wants to block the agency from using the cute likenesses.
“The Lego Group reached out to us and respectfully asked us to refrain from using their intellectual property in our social media content which of course we understand and will comply with,” police spokesman Lt. Jeremy Durrant told Fox News Digital.
“We are currently exploring other methods to continue publishing our content in a way that is engaging and interesting to our followers,” he added to the outlet.
Images on the department’s Instagram page showed the digitally superimposed blocks with a variety of facial expressions — crying, frowning, smirking or raging.
One appeared to show two suspects handcuffed in the back of a patrol car — with the Lego face on one angrily looking at the other, whose toy head is crying.
Another showed five people in a lineup who were completely unrecognizable because of the toy heads.
“The Murrieta Police Department prides itself in its transparency with the community, but also honors everyone’s rights & protections as afforded by law; even suspects,” the police agency said on social media last week.
“In order to share what is happening in Murrieta, we chose to cover the faces of suspects to protect their identity while still aligning with the new law,” it added.
In 2021, the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 1475, which prohibits local law enforcement agencies from publishing images of suspects in nonviolent crimes.
Last year, the state also passed AB 994, which requires mugs of any suspect to be removed from social media within 14 days unless there are special circumstances, according to the LA Times.
Durrant previously told the news outlet that the department has been obscuring faces in photos in various ways for the past couple of years.
The department has been obscuring suspects’ faces by using emojis, Barbie dolls and even “Shrek” characters.