City Hall wants to take charge of LAPD rules

Los Angeles City Council members on the far left are pushing a plan to move key decisions about policing away from the experts who run the LAPD. Instead they want city politicians and the city controller to write the rules on how officers work, who gets disciplined, and where money goes. One council member even tweeted that the idea is “simple” – give City Hall the power to make LAPD policy through new laws. Their wish list includes banning certain traffic stops that they claim unfairly target Black and Latino drivers and cutting off all cooperation with federal immigration agents. They also want to create a brand-new office inside the controller’s department that would control more of the police budget. The controller has already said he wants to shift police funds into social services instead. These proposals ignore how the LAPD actually behaves. The department already faces layers of oversight from a five-person civilian board that can overrule the police chief. In one recent case, the board rejected the chief’s decision that officers were justified in shooting a woman who had fired at them. If politicians who rarely patrol the streets gain even more power, response times could slow and crime could rise.

The activists also keep repeating old claims that policing is racist. They want to scrap “pretext stops, ” a term they use for any stop they don’t like, even when it follows the law. Yet the numbers show something different. In 2024, Black Angelenos committed 37% of violent felonies and 48% of robberies, while making up only 8% of the city’s population. White residents committed 8% of violent felonies and 5% of robberies, yet they’re 28% of the population. Despite these facts, Black drivers are stopped five times more often than white drivers, not 16 or 35 times more often as critics claim they should be. Use-of-force data tell the same story. In 2024 the LAPD fired its guns 29 times out of 1. 1 million public contacts. That’s down 74% since 1990. Officers were attacked 738 times that year—about twice a day. In all but three of the 29 shootings, the suspect was armed or posed an immediate threat. Houston, a city with fewer officers per resident, had 28 officer shootings in the same period, showing that more political control doesn’t automatically mean fewer shootings. Behind the scenes, the LAPD is stretched thin. A 2025 study found low morale and high turnover because officers spend too much time dealing with citizen complaints and red tape. If City Hall takes over discipline and budgets, the balance will tilt even further against the officers who put their lives on the line every shift. The full council will soon vote on whether to send these changes to the November ballot. If it does, voters will decide whether to keep one of the nation’s most respected police forces intact—or hand control to politicians who have never worn a badge.

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