Do your family vacation plans this summer include a visit to Southern California? Maybe you’re the frugal type and worry that a day at Disneyland will break the budget. Fear not: There’s a place just up the freeway where the admission is free, but you can still experience Los Angeles’s version of Fantasyland.
If you’re willing to pay the exorbitant cost of parking in Downtown Los Angeles, if you don’t mind the risk of having your luggage looted from your car, if you’re unbothered by the prospect of walking among and stepping over the drug-addicted vagrants milling about and lying unconscious on the sidewalks, then pack up the kids and bring them to L.A. City Hall, where the members of the city council live in a make-believe world far beyond anything Walt Disney ever imagined.
Last Wednesday, the council unanimously approved a motion instructing the Los Angeles police commission to establish policies that would “prohibit pretextual stops of motorists and cyclists” by LAPD officers.
The members of the council hold views that represent the broad range of political thought in L.A., which is to say, from left to far left to far, far left, and Wednesday’s vote reflects the magical thinking, sadly common among such people, that crime statistics among ethnic groups should mirror each group’s share of the population. The burden of pretext stops, they say, falls most heavily on black and brown residents, and these disparities simply cannot be tolerated.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in Whren v. United States (1996), held that pretextual stops are lawful, and my own experience as an LAPD officer has shown how valuable they can be in detecting and curtailing crime. All across the country, the prisons are full of people whose path to the penitentiary began with a broken taillight or an expired car registration.
No matter, says the L.A. city council. Pretextual stops make some of our constituents feel put upon and, therefore, must be stopped. When it comes to the delicate sensibilities of our black and brown brethren, who cares what the Supreme Court says? We, the enlightened members of this exalted council, know better.
Yes, the council members are free to entertain the fantasy that crime statistics are not racially skewed, but LAPD officers, like police officers everywhere, must operate in the real world, where the simple mathematics of murder tell us that, although black people comprise just 8% of the city’s population, in 2024, they made up 39% of homicide arrests.
Hispanics are 48% of L.A.’s population and made up half of the city’s homicide arrests that year, while non-Hispanic whites, with 16% of the population, made up 9% of homicide arrests. In other words, any random black person in Los Angeles is 15 times more likely to be a killer than any random white person.
Consider also the ethnic geography and raw numbers of crime across the city. In the largely white and affluent West L.A. Division, for example, there had been two murders, 34 robberies, and 64 aggravated assaults this year as of May 2. Across town in the predominantly Hispanic and black 77th Street Division, the same period saw 11 homicides, 227 robberies, and 496 aggravated assaults.
And yet, the utopians of the L.A. city council would have the LAPD patrolling with a blind eye to these glaring differences. Given that the vast majority of murders in Los Angeles and elsewhere are intra-racial, the ones who would suffer most from such a myopic policy are the very minority groups the council members imagine themselves to be protecting.
The LAPD investigated 230 murders in 2025, 54 fewer than in 2024. In 1992, at the height of the gang and drug wars that plagued the city, the number was a horrifying 1,092. It was creative, proactive police work over the years that brought about this change, including the use of pretextual stops when circumstances warranted.
In voting to deny the LAPD the use of this valuable and perfectly legal tool, the L.A. city council is showing a willingness to take a step toward the bad old days. How many lives will be lost because of it?
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