(KNX 1070) - Mayor Eric Garcetti and Police Chief Michel Moore say they will take action to investigate reports about higher rates of traffic stops of African Americans by LAPD's Metropolitan Division officers, while at the same time expressing confidence in the officers and the department's overall strategies for crime reduction.
Last week, an LA Times analysis found nearly half of the drivers stopped by the LAPD Metropolitan Division are black, in a city where less than 10 percent of the population is black.
Mayor Eric Garcetti says a closer look at that will be done shortly.
"The Office of the Inspector General is going to be releasing the results of an audit of stops made by the gang enforcement division. That will be followed by a second audit later this year, an in-depth study focusing on stops conducted by LAPD's Metro division as well," Garcetti said.
LAPD Chief Moore took issue with what he called a simplistic analysis of the newspaper report.
"We know the incident of violent crime does not strictly follow the proportionality of the ethnic makeup of a community. Neither should our enforcement strategies," Moore said.
The Inspector general analysis will also involve reviews of body and car camera videos and arrest reports, which would also list probable cause for traffic stops and searches by Metro officers.
A new report said officers in the Metropolitan Division, which includes South Los Angeles, have been disproportionately stopping black drivers. The report says they were pulled over five times more than their share of the city's population.
LAPD Chief Michel Moore says in the Southeast, Southwest and 77th St divisions, more than 70 percent of the described violent crime suspects are black. Moore tells KNX there are other more relevant statistics:
"Forty-seven percent of the victims of violent crime are African Americans, which is disproportionate to their resident population. Seventy-one percent of the described suspects [or] individuals involved committing violent crimes is African American in those same communities," he said.
Connie Rice is a civil rights attorney, co-director of the Advancement Project and a longtime LAPD watchdog, who tells KNX that many of the drivers being pulled over are not suspected criminals. Rice calls it "stop-and-frisk in a car," referring to a controversial New York Police Department practice that disproportionately affected blacks and Latinos.
The data analyzed by The Times doesn't indicate why a driver was pulled over, whether the vehicle was searched.
