After the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles Police Commission updated a policy earlier this year to restrict officers’ ability to make traffic stops, critics say doing so has led to an uptick in crime.
At issue is what’s known as pretextual stop, or a traffic stop conducted by a police officer on suspicion of a larger crime at play.
The practice has allowed officers to pull drivers over for mundane reasons—a broken taillight or an expired registration, for example—in order to justify a vehicle search.
However, after the death of George Floyd in 2020, calls by activists and some politicians for police reform—including doing away with such pretextual stops—were heard in police departments across the country.
In March, the LAPD commission changed its policy so that such traffic or pedestrian stops and vehicle searches could only occur if there were clear justifiable reasons, in addition to the traffic violation, not just a “mere hunch or on generalized characteristics.”
Since the updated policy, the LAPD’s traffic stops have decreased, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, which found officers are stopping fewer drivers for minor violations and consequently are conducting fewer vehicle searches.
Proponents of the policy change see this as a win.
One such proponent is Push LA, a progressive coalition of Angelenos advocating for the suspension of pretextual stops.
However, Push LA didn’t agree entirely with the updated policy, since it only placed limitations around pretextual stops and didn’t dismiss it altogether.
“The stops must stop, and the LAPD’s proposal to curtail them unless they’re ‘intended to protect public safety’ is incredibly vague and leaves wide-ranging operating room for more of the same racial profiling that’s been a hallmark of the Los Angeles Police Department,” they said in a statement submitted to the council in February.
According to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times of LAPD data from April to August, officers conducted vehicle searches in about 25 percent of stops, compared with 30 percent during the same five-month period in 2021. Now, officers are relying more frequently on consent-to-search from drivers.
The goal of the updated policy was to curb racially disproportionate traffic stops, which the LAPD’s Inspector General’s Office recommended in a 2019 report.
The report included a review of vehicle, pedestrian, and bicycle stops conducted by the LAPD and relied primarily on an analysis of data collected and maintained by the department pursuant to the 2015’s California Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which aims to eliminate racial and identity profiling in law enforcement.
The data indicated drivers “perceived to be Black were overrepresented in the number of officer-initiated stops made across Los Angeles, while those identified as White or Asian were significantly underrepresented,” the report found.
However, the report said the reasons “for such racial disparities are not easily understood, primarily because a city’s residential population is an inherently imperfect benchmark for stops.”
At the time of the report, the LAPD said in a statement, “While the report identified disparate impacts relative to the number of stops involving people of color, the report did not find disparate treatment of those individuals who were stopped.”
Additionally, the LAPD said officers “generally did not know the race of the person prior to the stop and actions did not vary significantly by race.”
That sentiment rings true today for some.
Tom Saggau, co-founder of the Los Angeles Police Protective League—a union representing more than 9,000 sworn officers in the LAPD, told The Epoch Times, “For us, the racial aspect has zero to do with it.”
“What does it the matter what race you are if you don’t have tags on your car?” he said.
Saggau said the new policy contributes to more crime in the city because “when you stop fewer cars, you’re going to have an increase in crime,” he said.
Saggau pointed to LAPD’s latest crime statistics published on Nov. 5, which indicate a 28 decrease in stops compared to the same time last year and a 4 percent decrease in firearms recovered.
Meanwhile, shots fired are up nearly 16 percent leading to an increase in victims injured by almost 11 percent.
Going back to 2019, the increase in shots fired and victims injured jumps to nearly 49 and 44 percent, respectively.
“Pretextual stops are dropping, but what that means is it’s just way more guns out on the street,” Saggau said. “If you want to make it where you don’t have to have a license plate or insurance or tags, then go to the Legislature and change the law—but don’t tell officers don’t enforce the law.”
Representatives from the LAPD and the Police Commission didn’t return a request for comment by press deadline.
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