By Nathaniel Percy
Los Angeles Daily News
LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners voted Tuesday, March 1, to update its policy on “pretextual stops” to discipline officers if they fail to say why a traffic stop or minor traffic violation leads to a more serious criminal investigation.
Under the new policy, officers would only be able to make pretextual stops if they are “acting upon articulable information” and not just a hunch or based on general characteristics. Officers would have to explain on their body-worn cameras why they initiated the stop.
Disciplinary actions would include additional training and then escalate with further violations, but what would happen in those cases was not specified.
Pretextual stops are defined in the policy as one where officers “use reasonable suspicion or probable cause of a minor traffic code violation as a pretext to investigate another, more serious crime that is unrelated to that violation.”
An October 2020 report by the Office of Inspector General showed that LAPD was stopping Black and Latino drivers at a disproportionate rate to White drivers for minor traffic violations and subjecting them to more intense vehicle searches.
The report found that a small number of those stops led to evidence of serious crimes leading to arrests.
Los Angeles Police Department Chief Michel Moore, as well as the commissioners, said Tuesday they believe the new policy also aims to strike a balance between community members who want the stops completely eliminated, citing racial profiling, and others who believe that restricting the stops will lead to an increase in violence and an increase in guns and drugs on the streets.
“There is no data that anyone can point to that establishes that pretextual stops curtail violent crime in our city,” Commission President William Briggs said. “In fact, (data from the Racial and Identity Profiling Act) shows just the opposite.”
Los Angeles City Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson said the policy was a step in the right direction, noting that he didn’t know a Black male driver, and very few Latino male drivers, who didn’t have stories about being stopped for “reasons that didn’t make sense.
“What you can’t replace is the extent to which trust can be so easily degraded when a person is stopped and they can’t figure out why they were stopped or the reason doesn’t add up for them,” Harris-Dawson said.
The pretextual stops came under scrutiny after a Los Angeles Times investigation found that some crime suppression officers in the LAPD’s Metropolitan Division were stopping thousands of mostly innocent drivers in South L.A. and around downtown.
The investigation led to an outcry from community leaders and civil rights activists, leading LAPD to wind down the strategy.
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