LAPD Detective Slams Unarmed Traffic Enforcement Proposal

A Los Angeles Police Department detective bashed the city for a recent proposal to use unarmed personnel from other departments to handle traffic stops during a televised interview Friday.

“I don’t understand who comes up with these ideas, but it’s really a subtle form of still defunding the police,” Detective Jamie McBride said during a televised interview on “Fox & Friends” Friday. “This is reckless behavior.”

McBride was responding to a Los Angeles Times report that the city is considering using unarmed personnel from other departments to enforce “traffic related violations” after an outside firm did a three-year study for the City Council, the report said.

“I have recovered scores of guns during traffic investigations and violent suspects,” he said during the interview. “I also remember an incident where I tried to stop somebody for going through a stop sign and we had a pursuit. During the pursuit, the passenger leaned out and was firing rounds at me.”

The study was commissioned by the city’s transportation department and is in line with efforts spearheaded since the 2020 George Floyd murder by Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, the Daily Mail reported. 

According to the Mail, the proposal also comes after California settled a $24 million civil rights lawsuit about a man who died after being restrained for a blood sample during a 2020 traffic stop while telling officers on the scene that he couldn’t breathe.

In the report, LAPD Chief Michel Moore said that “finding alternatives to a police response is something that the department is very much interested in.”

“If [Department of Transportation] were to pick that work up, I think we’d welcome it,” Moore said in the Mail’s report.

According to the report, traffic collision deaths increased to 312 in 2022, up 29% since 2020.

“As a city, we get an F grade for our traffic, for the amount of traffic violations and our ability to curb serious fatalities and injuries,” Damian Kevitt, executive director of Streets Are For Everyone, said in a statement to the Mail. “I understand that we’ve got a housing crisis, I don’t disagree that we’re prioritizing that. But we [also] have a public health traffic violence crisis.”

The police department’s largest union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, has been pushing to take sworn officers off “non-violent” calls and replacing them with unarmed civilians working in different city departments to reduce the burden on its members, the Los Angeles Times reported in March.

“Police officers are sent to too many calls that are better suited for unarmed service providers,” Craig Lally, the union’s president, said in a statement to the news outlet at the time.

A spokesman for Mayor Karen Bass said at the time that such moves could “compromise public safety.”

“Taken as a whole, this proposal would compromise public safety,” Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl told the Times. “But we welcome discussion of proposals that would make our neighborhoods safer.”