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Radicals are plotting an ignorant and dangerous takeover of the LAPD

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 chief and 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........

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