“There is none so blind,” goes the old saying, “as he who does not want to see.”
Willful blindness is an unfortunate defect in anyone, all the more so in someone who earns a living reporting the news. Alas, at the Los Angeles Times it is not viewed as a defect at all, but rather as a prerequisite for obtaining and maintaining employment.
I refer you a story in the Times published Sept. 1 under the headline, “Traffic deaths are on the rise. Why is the LAPD pulling over fewer drivers?” Written by Times staff writers Libor Jany and Hailey Wang, the story laments the decline in traffic enforcement by LAPD officers seen in recent years. “In 2019,” Jany and Wang write, “LAPD officers made about 713,000 stops across the city; by 2025, that number had decreased to roughly 308,000 — a roughly 57% decline.”
To no one’s surprise, with the possible exception of Jany, Wang, and their editors at the newspaper, the decline in traffic stops has been accompanied by an increase in fatal traffic collisions, which rose by 29% between 2016 and 2023, with pedestrian deaths up 54% during the same period.
In their search for an explanation, Jany and Wang offer further evidence of their unwillingness to see the evidence right under their noses. “In some ways, the decline in stops is unsurprising,” they write. “Other large U.S. cities have seen similar changes in enforcement strategies by police since the pandemic.”
The attempt to attribute the shift in policing since 2020 to the COVID pandemic is laughable. Yes, the COVID lockdowns began in March 2020, coinciding with a slight increase in homicides nationwide, but the broad retreat from proactive policing and the horrific increase in urban bloodshed began with the death of George Floyd on May 25 of that year.
Like all humans, police officers and criminals respond to incentives and disincentives, weighing the risks and rewards for any contemplated course of action. With the anti-police hysteria that swept the country after Floyd’s death, with Floyd himself hailed as a martyred hero and the involved officers swept up in the perversion of justice that was the criminal case against them, police officers from coast to coast came to realize that their job, which they understood was already fraught with risk, became even more so. Every encounter with an uncooperative suspect, especially those of certain ethnicities, now carried the risk of a public pillorying, financial ruin, and even imprisonment.
For their part, criminals came to realize that the risks of their predatory behavior were correspondingly lessened as police officers overlooked violations of the law that would previously have been addressed. This dynamic extended to traffic violations, with some people driving faster and more aggressively. The resulting increase in collisions, injuries, and fatalities should come as no surprise, except, of course, to employees at the Los Angeles Times.
What is most galling about the type of reporting exemplified in the L.A. Times story is the steadfast refusal to acknowledge a simple fact that everyone knows but some pretend not to. Jany and Wang write of a 2019 Times investigation that found “significant racial disparities in LAPD crime suppression tactics.” The question one must ask when these “disparities” are alleged is, disparate to what?
Like most mainstream media outlets, the Times deceptively compares police stop and arrest numbers to overall population, which indeed reveals the disparities their writers and editors decry. But when one examines the actual crime statistics and the ethnic breakdown of offenders, the stop and arrest data make more sense. Blacks comprise about 8 % of L.A.’s population, yet they commit 41% of the city’s violent crime, 39% of its homicides, and 50% of its robberies. This is a disparity the Times stubbornly refuses to acknowledge, and they would have the city’s police officers ignore it in the name of some perverse concept of “racial justice.”
It’s easy to sit in a newsroom and pretend the world is somehow different from the way you would wish. When these delusions influence public policy, the price is often paid in someone else’s blood.
Editor’s Note: We voted for mass deportations, not mass amnesty. Help us continue to fight back against those trying to go against the will of the American people.
Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member