Marvin Reid can’t say how many pedestrians he’s seen get hit while trying to brave the North Hollywood intersection of Magnolia Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue. He gave up keeping count long ago.
One afternoon last spring, he watched as a man was struck while walking toward a 7-Eleven on the corner. Fortunately, the man popped to his feet “like nothing ever happened” and hustled into the store, Reid said. A week or two prior, he said, an out-of-control motorist nearly plowed into the statue of Amelia Earhart that sits next to a library bearing the famous aviator’s name.
“This is really a bad spot.” said Reid, who has helped run a Jamaican food pop-up at the busy street corner for five years. “It doesn’t matter if it’s an old lady crossing the street with a walker.”
The number of Angelenos who die in traffic crashes now regularly outpaces those killed by homicide. From 2016 to 2023, the annual traffic death toll rose nearly 29% overall, and pedestrian deaths jumped roughly 54%. Fatal crashes fell slightly last year, but deaths still exceeded 300 in each of the last three years.
Cars pass by a flower vendor along Forest Lawn Drive in Los Angeles.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
The city is rolling out 125 speed cameras in school zones, known street-racing corridors and places where speeding has contribute to a high rate of collisions — including Reid’s intersection.
But for him, the cameras aren’t a replacement for police traffic enforcement, which he said seems virtually nonexistent.
Even though LAPD squad cars are posted outside the library “every day,” he says, officers rarely do anything about the drivers who come careening off the exit ramps from the nearby 170 Freeway.
Similar complaints are being echoed around the city. Historically, Los Angeles — like other places across the U.S. — has relied on police stops to produce road safety. But in recent years, public pressure has compelled city leaders to think more critically about whether enforcement can continue without the historical harms that has come along with it.
LAPD data show the department is far less proactive than it used to be.
In 2019, LAPD officers made about 713,000 stops across the city; by 2025, that number had decreased to roughly 308,000 — a 57% decline. A Times analysis of police stop data found that the drop-off was especially pronounced in the Central, West Valley, 77th Street and Southeast police divisions.
In some ways, the decline in stops is unsurprising. Other large U.S. cities have seen similar changes in enforcement strategies by police since the COVID-19 pandemic. As the department continues to shrink, LAPD commanders say they have fewer resources to devote to traffic duty. Officials have been under pressure to curb the use of so-called pretext stops, in which officers use a minor violation — a broken turn signal, say, or a cracked windshield — as justification to stop someone in order to investigate whether a more serious crime has occurred.
Reform activists and some city leaders contend the stops are fishing expeditions that lead to police abuses — while failing to deliver safer streets.
The practice of pulling over random vehicles, often based on little more than a hunch, has been a cornerstone of the city’s crime-fighting strategy for decades. The tactic is especially prevalent among the department’s elite Metropolitan Division and anti-gang units, several of which have come under investigation in recent years for failing to document the stops and improper searches.
Since 2019, when a Times investigation found significant racial disparities in LAPD crime suppression tactics, officials have slowed — but never abandoned — the practice of flooding neighborhoods with tactical officers to pull people over and search their vehicles.
Four years later, stops for minor violations began dropping again after LAPD overhauled its policies to limit the circumstances under which officers can make pretext stops, joining law enforcement agencies in cities such as Philadelphia, Seattle and Berkeley.
Yet a report published last year found that officers are still disproportionately targeting Black and Latino drivers.
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell and other department leaders have fought against more restrictions, arguing they risk losing an essential weapon against serious crime.
Tourists and other visitors wait for the light to change at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue in Hollywood.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
With the death toll from speeding on the rise, more enforcement is needed, not less, department leaders say. The city, they argue, can’t afford to wait on alternative programs that require study, money and public buy-in that could take years.
In May, the Los Angeles City Council passed a measure urging the Police Commission, the LAPD’s policymaking body, to further limit arbitrary pull-overs for nonmoving traffic violations.
Commission officials said they would wait for the results of a pair of audits by the inspector general’s office before making any further policy changes. The first report suggested that problems with the department’s gang officers were far more widespread than the department has publicly let on.
The audit found that gang units citywide routinely flouted the department’s rules on pretext stops, including by often failing to obtain proper consent to search vehicles.
The inspector general’s office reviewed a sample of 300 stops and found that gang officers didn’t always turn on their body-worn or dashboard cameras as required during these encounters, and that the department probably undercounted “both the number of detentions and the enforcement actions taken” by its gang units. The findings of a second report — which reviewed pretext stops by officers from other units in January — are expected to be presented at an upcoming commission meeting.
The Los Angeles Police Protective League, the union for rank-and-file officers, and other proponents of pretext stops argue that elected leaders don’t grasp the consequences of doing away with the tactic, which the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed lawful.
Reform advocates have fought to deploy unarmed civilians instead of LAPD officers for traffic enforcement — as the city has already started doing for certain mental-health-related calls — but the union has warned that the work is too dangerous.
Amid the debate over how to proceed, LAPD enforcement hasn’t vanished completely.
Even though the department no longer dispatches officers to the scenes of minor accidents, LAPD statistics show that enforcement by the department’s 308-member traffic bureau has gone up. As of July, the number of traffic tickets issued had climbed 44% from the same time last year — increasing to more than 14,600 from around 10,100. Citations for impaired driving have also risen, and the department continues to crack down on street takeovers.
Even proponents of change agree that officers should continue to make stops for violations that present a safety risk to other motorists, such as pulling over drivers for making illegal turns and checking for intoxication and other offenses that could put others in harm’s way. But, they argue, such enforcement efforts should be paired with redesigned roads and public education campaigns aimed at getting people to drive more responsibly.
Still, progress toward new, nonpolice approaches to traffic enforcement has been frustratingly slow in Los Angeles, advocates say.
Chrysalis worker Gerald McCaffee paints over graffiti as a car speeds by at the lip of the 3rd Street tunnel in downtown Los Angeles in May.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Advocates have pointed to mounting research in other cities that showed road improvements along high-injury street corridors were more effective than police at changing driver behaviors.
Supporters of so-called self-enforcing roads say narrowing lanes can lead to a considerable decline in crashes as drivers reduce their speed and move more cautiously. Such changes also reclaim space for protected bike lanes, public transit lines or safer walkways — after long prioritizing convenience for cars, advocates say.
Car accidents are dangerous for everyone involved, but they have become even more hazardous for pedestrians and cyclists.
Experts cite speeding and cellphone distractions as two of the biggest problems.
Another factor is the proliferation of larger vehicles — a phenomenon known as “autobesity” — which have bigger blind spots and are more likely to seriously injure a pedestrian or bicyclist.
Andres Ramirez, executive director for the transportation advocacy nonprofit People for Mobility Justice, said he’s cautiously optimistic that Mayor Karen Bass’ promise of a “no-car” 2028 Olympic Games will help fast-track some of the most pressing road safety projects.
“The streets needs to be a lot safer for pedestrians, for bicyclists, different modes,” Ramirez said. “The most obvious way is ensuring that infrastructure projects are prioritized in communities that have long been ignored.”
