Wave Wire Services
LOS ANGELES — The City Council approved a proposal May 6 calling on the Los Angeles Police Department to prohibit what are known as pretextual stops, a move one council member described as a historic step for civil rights.
On a 14-0 vote, the council requested the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners to update regulations on the use of pretextual stops with the aim to bar such detentions of motorists and cyclists except in cases where violations pose a significant and imminent safety risk.
Councilwoman Traci Park was absent during the vote.
While the council is recommending an end to pretextual stops, the police commission has the final say. The five-member entity, whose members are appointed by the mayor, sets policies for the LAPD.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said the request asks the Board of Police Commissioners to examine the LAPD’s pretextual stop policy with the goal of ending them and to reform the basis on which consensual stops are conducted.
“Unfortunately, the idea that we live in a society where a minor traffic infraction is responded to by the government with a confrontation from a government worker with a gun, I think, is barbaric,” Harris-Dawson said. “It is beneath us, and it is wholly uncivilized for everybody.”
Harris-Dawson added that the council’s request will give the police commission the tools to codify regulations on pretextual stops and to provide training for LAPD officers to understand the new landscape of what is permissible and what is not.
Councilwoman Heather Hutt called the vote “a historic victory for civil rights and for public safety in Los Angeles.”
“It takes steps to create a city where everyone feels safe while moving through Los Angeles,” Hutt said.
The LAPD’s current policy allows officers to stop drivers for minor traffic violations that are then used as means for an investigation. In March 2022, the department and city elected officials updated the policy, requiring officers to provide “articulatable information” and explain their reasons for the stop.
Los Angeles Department of Transportation officials have recommended removing all non-moving and equipment-related traffic violations as reasons for a pretextual stop.
A report by the chief legislative analyst’s office examined the pretextual stop policy between April 2022 and September 2025 and found that there were approximately 760,000 total traffic stops during that time — about 9% of which were pretextual. Of those stops, over two-thirds resulted in a warning with no further corrective action.
Many pretextual stops were concentrated in Council Districts 8, 9, 14 and 15, encompassing neighborhoods in South LA, downtown, East Los Angeles and the South Bay area, accounting for about 48% of all stops.
Approximately 86% of pretextual stops involved individuals who LAPD officers perceived to be Black or Latino. And 85% of pretextual stops were individuals the officers perceived to be men.
The effort to prohibit pretextual stops began in 2020, when Harris-Dawson and then-City Councilman Mike Bonin introduced the motion to alter the LAPD’s policy on this matter.
Bonin returned to City Hall to join the City Council May 6 and said the motion was introduced in response to the George Floyd demonstrations, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the killing of Floyd, who was unarmed when a Minneapolis Police Department officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes and killed him on May 25, 2020. The officer was later convicted of murder.
“We’re either working on policies that can further racism or undo racism,” Bonin said.
Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez claimed that pretextual stops do not make residents safer. She noted that two-thirds of the stops don’t result in a citation, and said the city is wasting limited resources when officers could be responding to crimes or other emergencies.
“This is one step,” Hernandez said. “Please, hear me. You need to advocate to the Board of Police Commissioners because under the City Charter, the city’s constitution, as council members we’re only allowed to ask the Board of Police Commissioners to ask LAPD to do something.”
The LAPD has warned against fully banning pretextual stops. In March, Assistant Chief Emada Tingirides told council members there would be multiple impacts if the policy were to be further limited.
Tingirides, who is Black, said she understands the concern, trauma and stress associated with being pulled over by a police officer, as well as the concern in communities impacted by violent crime.
She emphasized that there needs to be a balanced approach when addressing public safety, and further noted there are multiple efforts to address policing issues via unarmed crisis response model programs and gang- reduction efforts, among other things.
“It takes all of us, and there’s not one way that we’re going to be able to address public safety in one realm,” Tinigrides said previously. “We need police for traffic safety.”
Jose Herrera writes for City News Service.
