The Defund the Police movement lives on in the LA City Council, only now it flies under the banner of democratic control.
The council’s most left-wing members seek to transfer crime-fighting authority from law enforcement experts to the council and the city controller.
These would-be police overlords might want to familiarize themselves with the agency that they aspire to run. They would learn that the LAPD sets a national standard of professionalism and restraint.
According to The California Post, council members Hugo Soto-Martinez, Eunisses Hernandez, and Nithya Raman want the power to override the LAPD police chiefand the civilian Police Commission’s decisions regarding tactics, officer discipline, and funding.
“Our proposal is simple,” wrote Soto-Martinez on social media. “Give City Council the ability to set LAPD policy through laws.”
The council activists want to ban what they call “pretextual stops of black and brown people” and to prevent LAPD officers from working with ICE agents, reports the Post.
They seek to create a new fiefdom within the city controller’s office — a “Bureau of Police Oversight” — that would possess greater authority over the LAPD’s finances. Not coincidentally, Controller Kenneth Meija has called for shifting police resources into social services and alternatives to policing, according to the Post.
These proposals are ignorant and dangerous.
The LAPD is already overregulated and second-guessed. The council activists apparently view the five-member civilian Police Commission as too sympathetic to officers. It is anything but.
In the last several months it overrode Police Chief Jim McDonnell’s reasoned assessment of two police shootings. In the most recent case, a female suspect had shot at officers after ignoring multiple orders to drop her handgun. The officers returned fire, hitting her in the arm. Chief McDonnell deemed the shooting justified. The commission overturned his decision.
The council would be even less aware of the challenges that officers face on the streets every day.
The idea that it should be setting LAPD policy, as Soto-Martinez wants, is a recipe for bureaucratic inertia at best and for spiraling crime at worst.
The activists apparently don’t even know that the LAPD is already banned from cooperating with ICE.
As for their call to ban “pretextual stops of black and brown people,” this unconstitutionally race-based policy rests on the hackneyed Black Lives Matter conceit that policing is racist.
In fact, the LAPD under stops blacks and over stops whites, when group crime rates are taken into account. (The phrase “pretextual stops” is shorthand for: “Stops that we don’t like, despite their legality.”)
In 2024, blacks in Los Angeles committed 37% of all violent felonies and 48% of all robberies, according to the victims of, and witnesses to, felony crime.
Whites committed 8% of all violent felonies and 5% of robberies. (These data come from the LAPD’s 2024 Use of Force Year-End Review.)
Blacks are 8%of the city’s population; whites, 28%. This means that blacks are 16 times more likely to commit a violent felony and 35 times more likely to commit a robbery than whites.
Yet blacks are only five times more likely to be stopped than whites: They make up 24% of all pedestrian and vehicle stops, while whites make up 17% of all such stops.
The LAPD’s use of force is low compared to other police departments. In 2024, LAPD officers discharged their guns 29 times. That is a 74% drop since 1990, when the LAPD engaged in 115 shooting incidents.
For context, LAPD officers had 1.1 million documented contacts with civilians in 2024. They made 348,531 stops and 43,374 arrests.
In only 0.06% of all arrests did the officers discharge their guns. By contrast, officers were attacked 738 times in 2024 — or twice a day.
In all but three of those 29 officer-involved shooting incidents in 2024, the suspect who was shot at was either armed and shooting at the officer, armed, or otherwise threatening serious harm to the officer or civilians.
Compare this to the Houston Police Department. In 2024, it logged 28 officer-involved shootings, one less than the LAPD, even though the Houston PD has about 3,500 fewer sworn officers than the LAPD.
The Houston officer headcount is lower on an absolute basis, its per capita headcount based on the Houston population is higher than the LAPD’s. That should give it more options regarding the use of force, yet its officer-involved shooting rate is higher than the LAPD’s.
The council activists want to reassess police staffing levels and funding. Good idea! There is only one conclusion to be drawn: The LAPD is woefully understaffed and underfunded.
According to a Rand report from 2025, the LAPD’s inadequate manpower has contributed to abysmal morale and to high levels of attrition. Officers have a difficult time navigating the cumbersome civilian complaint review process; that uneven playing field discourages proactive policing, according to the Rand report.
Give the council activists power over LAPD disciplinary processes and the odds will tip even further against officers who are only trying to protect the public.
The full city council will soon decide whether to put the radicals’ reform proposals on the November ballot.
It undoubtedly will do so. It will then rest with Los Angeles voters to defend the integrity of one of America’s most storied and professional police agencies and, in so doing, to protect public safety.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of When Race Trumps Merit.
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