A big question remains amid LAPD photo scandal: Just who is an undercover officer?

LOS ANGELES — As fallout continues around the Los Angeles Police Department’s release of undercover officers’ pictures, the question of who actually works undercover is far from settled.

Should it only be officers involved in the most sensitive assignments — embedded with drug cartels, terrorists and other criminal networks — who grow beards, dye hair, shed their identities?

Or should it also include those who only go undercover part time, busting johns who solicit sex or bartenders who sell alcohol to minors? And what about officers with fake online profiles?

The fraught and complicated issue of covert police activity has been made more so, as Los Angeles Police Department and police union officials try to claw back the images released in response to a March public records request. They argue that the danger such public photos present to officers who have assumed aliases to infiltrate the underworld overrides calls for transparency.

But some critics dismiss the LAPD’s claims as overblown and accuse the department of drumming up hysteria in the media as cover for its efforts to expand the definition of which officers’ identities should be kept from the public.

The photos’ release has raised fresh questions about just how much oversight there is of these undercover operations, given the