It's a bit more complicated than this. This was an investigatory stop. The bike offers an excuse for the stop&frisk, and gives them a way to ticket him that would've made it difficult for him to complain about being profiled or harassed, had he lived. The bias is the problem. https://twitter.com/hayesdavenport/status/1300637213726629890

Which sounds nitpicky, but it's not. There is a move to shift traffic stops to unarmed staff, which is good. But very little public discussion abt what will happen when armed officers are called to a scene. Or what will constitute "patrol" once this investigatory excuse is gone.

Several years back, while tracking incidences of profiling around USC, youth told me that officers had started harassing them from inside their squad cars. They were trying to get around the dashboard cameras being turned on. https://la.streetsblog.org/2013/05/13/a-tale-of-two-communities-part-ii-lapd-finds-it-stirred-up-hornets-nest-by-profiling-usc-students-of-color/

One young man even told me about when LAPD pulled up to a house party he was at, spotted some Latino youth out front, and asked them (from inside the car) if anyone in the house was on probation or parole.

Where there's a will to get around reform efforts, there's a way, in other words.

And it's why you hear the case being made that we are beyond reform at this point.

This is from 2015, so it doesn't get into defunding/abolishing discussion. But for any of the urbanists who might be listening in, it puts the case of a man shot by the cops he called for help finding a stolen bike into a livability framework. https://la.streetsblog.org/2015/07/17/man-is-shot-by-the-officers-he-called-to-help-search-for-stolen-bike-is-it-a-livable-streets-issue/

Taking the power away from police to write even bogus citations/have an excuse to stop someone is a good step...I don't want to minimize that. It's just not enough. Like in Anthony's case - LAPD harassed him with a bogus ticket when he broke his ankle just because they could.

But they also regularly singled him out when he would hang out with his Latino friends at a bike shop on Central...and they didn't need the excuse of a citation to do that. https://la.streetsblog.org/2018/02/09/webinar-on-policing-and-mobility-underscores-struggle-of-urban-planning-to-center-justice/