Lego forces police zone to stop using Lego heads to make suspects anonymous

The fact that a Californian police department uses Lego heads to anonymize suspects in photos does not sit well with Lego itself. The Danish toy manufacturer is now urging the police of the city of Murrieta to stop.

The photos distributed by the police department in the southern Californian city of Murrieta have gone viral in recent weeks. A new law went into effect in California on January 1, banning police from publishing photos of suspects in non-violent crimes, with some exceptions. So the Murrieta police came up with a creative solution: They continued to distribute photos, but stuck Lego heads over the faces of suspects.

In fact, the police seemed to have so much fun editing the photos that they kept looking for heads with facial expressions that fit exactly into the situation. The sad or crying faces were popular on social media, but not with Lego itself, it now appears.

The Danish toy company has told the Murrieta Police Department that they will have to find another way to continue distributing photos without breaking the law. “The Lego Group has approached us with the respectful request not to use their intellectual property on our social media, which we of course understand and will respect,” the police department wrote in a statement.

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They probably won’t have to look for long in Murrieta. They recently also stuck the face of the animated character Shrek on the head of a suspect because he “behaved like an ogre”.