LAPD Unit Disproportionately Stops Black Drivers: Report

LOS ANGELES, CA — To combat a surge in violent crime, the Los Angeles Police Department doubled the size of its elite Metropolitan Division in 2015, creating special units to swarm crime hot spots, it was reported Thursday.

Metro officers in unmarked, dark-gray SUVs began pulling over drivers to search cars for guns or drugs. By 2018, the number stopped by Metro was nearly 14 times greater than before the expansion, the Los Angeles Times reported. The effectiveness of the strategy is hard to assess: Crime continued to rise for several years before dipping in 2018.

But it has caused a shift that some consider alarming: Metro officers stop African American drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the city*s population, according to a Times analysis.

Nearly half the drivers stopped by Metro are black, which has helped drive up the share of African Americans stopped by the LAPD overall from 21 percent to 28 percent since the Metro expansion, in a city that is 9 percent black, according to the analysis.

Metro makes most of its vehicle stops in South Los Angeles, which is almost one-third African American. But even there, the percentage of black drivers stopped by Metro is twice their share of the population, the analysis found.

The data analyzed by The Times does not show why an individual officer pulled over a driver. It does not contain information about whether a driver was searched, ticketed or arrested after the stop. Nor can the data prove that Metro officers are engaged in racial profiling.

But some civil rights advocates say the racial disparities revealed by The Times' analysis are too extreme to be explained by other factors and troubling for a department that has spent the last quarter-century trying to repair its fractured relationship with the city's black residents.

Connie Rice, a civil rights attorney who has worked closely with the LAPD on reforms in recent years, called the racial breakdown of Metro stops "really off the chain."

"This is stop-and-frisk in a car," she said, referring to the New York Police Department's controversial practice of patting down black and Latino pedestrians, which was sharply curtailed after a legal settlement.

Chief Michel Moore, an LAPD veteran who took over the department in June, said the Metro command staff "is very aware of the potential of people viewing them as over-policing or being overly harsh." But he argued that intense policing is necessary in high-crime areas to keep residents safe.

City News Service