Fourteen to Zero
On pretextual stops (Council File 20-0875) and the structural ceiling of police reform in Los Angeles
Council File 20-0875 was opened in 2020. It closed last month, six years later, with a 14-0 vote of the Los Angeles City Council. One councilmember was absent; every other member voted yes.
The vote adopted a reform package on pretextual stops. It would prohibit pretextual stops and detentions of motorists and cyclists except where a violation poses a significant and imminent safety risk. It would ban consent-based searches during such stops. It would require officers to articulate the reason for any stop on body-worn video before questioning, in line with state law passed in 2022. It would direct the Office of Inspector General to monitor traffic stop data and report to the Council twice a year.
Then it would do nothing. Because this is not a law. The Los Angeles City Council has no authority over the Los Angeles Police Department. The Council can legislate directly for every other department in the city: Sanitation, Public Works, Transportation. The Police Department alone is carved out. Final policy authority over LAPD sits with the Board of Police Commissioners, a five-member civilian body appointed by the Mayor. What the Council can do is ask the Board to amend the policy. That is what the vote did.
The Board will receive the request. They may agendize it; they may not. They may vote on it; they may not. They may adopt the language as written; they may dilute it; they may reject it. None is appealable to the public. The most democratic body in the city government can ask. It cannot tell.
Pretextual stops are the everyday material of American policing. An officer pulls a car over for an inoperative taillight, an unsignaled lane change, a tinted window. The infraction is the door in. The encounter that follows is the point: the questioning, the look at the driver’s hands, the request to step out of the vehicle, the consent search. It is what the body of the driver experiences as routine surveillance and the threat of escalation. It is one of the dominant ways police presence becomes police harm.
Resmaa Menakem, in My Grandmother’s Hands, names this with care. Menakem defines the body as more than anatomy: the place where history is carried, where racialized trauma is transmitted across generations, where threat is felt before it is thought. Writing to patrol officers, he tells them that issuing citations for jaywalking, littering, or failing to signal a lane change is not service to the community. He notes, in passing, that this is not what officers do in affluent neighborhoods, and he asks why the practice is otherwise where they work. The encounter is geographically and racially distributed. The body of the officer and the body of the driver enter a relationship shaped by what Menakem calls the neo-Crow era: the structural pattern of policing as the targeting and corralling of dark-hued bodies.1
Menakem’s argument is that this dynamic will not be undone from above. It changes through the patrol officer who reorients to the neighborhood, through the chief who, where possible, “bucks the system.”2 This is a powerful diagnosis and a partial prescription. It is at the somatic and historical scale. It locates change in the body.
What it cannot do is render the change institutional. An individual officer who refuses to make pretextual stops is one officer. The patterns Menakem describes are produced by departmental policy, training, deployment, and incentive. Six years of public process at the Council have arrived at language that would do at the policy level what Menakem urges at the body level. That language was approved unanimously this morning. It will now sit on the desk of an appointed board.
There is another report on Los Angeles policing in front of the public this season. The RAND Corporation released its Organizational Assessment of the Los Angeles Police Department. It runs to 112 pages and offers more than fifty recommendations.3 It was commissioned by the Los Angeles Police Foundation, the private fundraising entity tied to LAPD leadership. Its audience is the Chief of Police.
The recommendations are organizational. RAND wants larger academy classes, civilianized administrative positions, faster background investigations, better internal communication between command staff and rank-and-file. It treats the Department’s complaint system as a workflow problem. The complaints, in RAND’s framing, are stressful for officers and “discourage proactive police activity.” The high-priority recommendation on discipline is to improve the ability of supervisors to handle nondisciplinary cases through guidance and training. That is to say: keep more of the disciplinary process inside the chain of command, faster.
RAND’s frame is not ignorant. The hiring pipeline really does take 349 days. Class sizes really are below replacement. The complaint system really is administratively burdened. These are real problems if your unit of analysis is the Department as an organization in need of internal optimization. They are not the problems you would identify if your unit of analysis were the body of the driver profiled.
The point is not that RAND has the wrong answers. The question RAND was paid to ask is how to optimize the Police Department as currently constituted. The question RAND was not paid to ask, and that the Police Foundation will never pay anyone to ask, is who should control the Department in the first place. The ceiling of the report is the ceiling of its commissioning structure.
There are at least three scales at which police reform can be argued in Los Angeles right now. Each has its own logic. None alone is sufficient.
The organizational scale is RAND’s: tidy the workflow, the staffing, the chart. The public is not the audience. Discipline tightens its grip on its own operations.
The somatic and historical scale is Menakem’s: reorient the body, refuse the routine encounter that produces harm, build daily presence in the community. The audience is the individual officer and the individual leader. The hope is that bodies harmonize. The limit is that institutions are not bodies; they are patterns that survive the bodies that compose them. Menakem himself concedes the limit when he tells leaders they will need to defy the institution they work inside. The system is the institution. The institution does not reform itself.
The structural and democratic scale is the one this vote inhabits and could not complete. It says: the question of what the Department is permitted to do should be answered by the body whose authority comes from the public. In Los Angeles right now, that body is the Council, and the Council does not have the authority. The City Charter, in Section 574, lodges general management and control of the Department with the Board of Police Commissioners.4 The Council can ask. The Mayor’s appointees decide. This was settled, in the form it now takes, by Charter Amendment F in 1992, which strengthened civilian oversight in the wake of the Christopher Commission’s report on the Rodney King beating.5 That reform was real. It is also why today’s Council can only request what it would have voted to require. Reforms harden into structures that constrain later reform.
Charter reform has the chance to undo this calcification. Council ordinance authority over Police Department policy would mean that this 14-0 vote was the law, not a petition.
Some will argue this is too much. That the Board of Police Commissioners is civilian oversight, that civilianization is what the post-Rodney King reforms intended, that giving the Council direct authority politicizes policing. The objection should be taken seriously, then refused. The Board is appointed civilian oversight, not elected civilian oversight. The Council, however imperfect, is the body whose members face the voters of fifteen districts every four years. That is the political accountability the Charter currently routes around. To call its restoration “politicization” is to defend the existing politics, in which a board appointed by a single official adjudicates the most consequential institution in the city.
Some will argue that the deferral is itself prudent. That police policy requires expertise, that boards exist for that reason, that rushing into ordinance authority would produce unstable governance. After six years of public process on a single policy item, ending in a unanimous vote that creates no obligation, the deferral argument is no longer prudence. It is evasion.
The body of the driver does not harmonize with the body of the officer across an institutional structure designed to keep them at war. The org chart does not self-correct against the interest that funds its assessment. The Council vote does not become law without the authority to make law. The vote was a precise demonstration: democratic will is here. Democratic power is not. Charter reform is the work of closing that gap.
Council File 20-0875 will sit, now, with the Board of Police Commissioners. Whether they act will be one more datum in a long record. The record itself is the case.
Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017), 276, 280.
Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands, 276, 281.
Richard H. Donohue, Samuel Peterson, Bob Harrison, Shawn Hill, Danielle Sobol, and Alejandro Roa Contreras, Organizational Assessment of the Los Angeles Police Department (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2025), available at www.rand.org/t/RRA3827-1.
Los Angeles City Charter, Section 574.
Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department (Los Angeles, 1991); Charter Amendment F, June 1992.