Los Angeles City Council just threw its full weight behind a crack down on LAPD’s pretextual stops.
In a unanimous 14-0 vote, lawmakers moved torein in the traffic stops, a routine tool officers have long used to pull drivers over for minor violations and probe for bigger crimes.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who has championed the effort to eliminate the stops sincefirst introducing the motionwith former Councilman Mike Bonin in 2020, framed the vote as a moral shift, calling armed responses to minor violations “barbaric” and “wholly uncivilized.”
“This is a big down payment,” he said, signaling more changes ahead. The vote caps six years of City Hall buildup that began in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
Inside Los Angeles City Hall on Wednesday, nearly 200 people packed the chamber for more than two hours of testimony. But beneath the headline shift, much of what is being touted as new already exists.
According to LAPD sources, several of the restrictions driving this push have lived for years inside department policy and training.
Officers are already expected, in many cases, to justify stops, document encounters and operate within limits on searches, including requirements to articulate the reason for a stop on body-worn video.
What the council has done now is take those internal rules and lock them into city law, elevating them from guidance to mandate and turning day-to-day practice into a political flashpoint.
Under the new framework, minor violations alone are no longer supposed to open the door to a traffic stop unless there is a clear and immediate public safety risk.
But the final deal, shaped in part by Councilman Tim McOsker, makes clear what remains untouched.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
