Kanye West was mentioned in 19,155 emails sent and received by Los Angeles police over a 2-year period

• The LAPD had over 19,000 emails about Kanye West and Donda Academy in their inboxes.
• The volume of emails was so large that LAPD could not export them all at once.

The Los Angeles Police Department sent and received so many emails referring to Kanye West and his secretive private school in the last two years that they exceeded the maximum number of gigabytes their computers could search.

Between January 1, 2022 and November 4, 2022 — when Insider submitted a public records request — there were 19,155 emails that mentioned "Kanye West" or "Donda Academy" in the in-and-outboxes of LAPD employees, an LAPD records analyst told Insider.

There were so many emails, in fact, that the files were too large for the police record system to search and export without narrowing them down, the analyst said. The LAPD asked Insider to narrow down the request so they could export and search for records.

"The query resulted in a file(s) that exceeds the maximum gigabyte that our system would allow to export; therefore, we are unable to search for and identify emails responsive to your request," the analyst said in an email to Insider.

In a phone conversation, an analyst told Insider that each of the 19,155 items were individual emails sent or received by the department. About 100 of the emails had to do with Donda Academy — the artist's controversial and secretive private school.

Insider's request asked for all emails that include the phrases "Donda Academy" or "Kanye West." The emails likely include person-to-person correspondence about the artist as well as include alerts that some employees may have set up to notify them about news events or posts online, the analyst said.

Kanye West, who now goes by the name Ye, came under fire last fall after he donned a "White Lives Matter" T-shirt, incorrectly insisted George Floyd died of a drug overdose, and made repeated antisemitic comments.

His comments prompted companies like Adidas, Balenciaga, and Gap to bow out of their corporate partnerships.

Since the fallout, Ye has stayed mostly out of the public eye and has been ghosting his lawyers in several open civil cases against him.

Several of Ye's lawyers at the firm Greenberg Traurig have asked a judge to let them stop representing him, but they haven't been able to get in touch with him on the phone or at his addresses. In that lawsuit, the company Ultra International Music Publishing accuses Ye of stealing elements from the 1986 Marshall Jefferson song "Move Your Body" for his song "Flowers," which is reportedly about his ex-wife Kim Kardashian.

Lawyers for his former business management firm, Thomas St. John, also say the artist has been avoiding them and that they spent weeks trying to track him down over a lawsuit over unpaid bills.

The Donda Academy, Ye's private Christian School, also came back into the spotlight in recent months.

In October, after the resignation of the then-administrator Tamar Andrews, Donda Academy parents received an email that the school was abruptly closed.

Days later, though, Insider spotted what appeared to be students and staff wearing the school's signature black uniform at the academy's secret location on November 2.

Ye was also present that day at the school's San Fernando Valley location, which is located in an industrial building about 20 miles from where the school was originally registered with the state.