Thousands of complaints, few punished: How LAPD handles claims of racial bias
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- Studies have repeatedly shown that Black and Latino people in L.A. are subjected to police stops at significantly higher rates than white people.
- Despite receiving many complaints from the public alleging racial bias, it’s extremely rare for officers to face discipline.
- L.A.’s City Council voted earlier this year to limit “pretextual” stops, in which police pull someone over for a minor equipment violation in order to investigate a potentially more serious crime. But the department has yet to change its policies.
Over the last decade, the LAPD has received thousands of complaints accusing officers of targeting people solely because of their race, ethnicity or other form of outward appearance.
Only one has been fired for it.
The former officer, Edgar Garcia Cancino, was part of a San Fernando Valley anti-gang unit whose members were alleged to have improperly pulled over and searched hundreds of motorists. Cancino has appealed his termination, arguing that other officers in his unit carried out more of the problematic stops. He claimed the department sought to make an example of him because he refused to implicate his superiors in wrongdoing.
Accusations of racial profiling have long plagued the department, alienating generations of Black and brown Angelenos. Known within the LAPD as “biased policing,” such complaints have persisted despite repeated attempts to enact reform. But the question of how commonly profiling occurs in the Los Angeles Police Department remains a topic of pointed debate.
Years of studies by researchers and reporting by The Times and other news outlets have found that Black and Latino people in L.A. are subjected to stops, frisks, searches and arrests at significantly higher rates than white people, regardless of whether they live in high-crime neighborhoods. Past LAPD chiefs have acknowledged that isolated cases of profiling may occur. At the same time, they have denied that there is a widespread, systemic problem.
An internal LAPD investigation of Cancino’s Mission Division gang squad uncovered an “overwhelming pattern of intentional policy violations,” according to a summary of the case file reviewed by The Times.
An LAPD Internal Affairs report said officers in the San Fernando Valley operated like a “law enforcement gang,” while another specialized unit in South L.A. is under investigation for allegedly turning off their body-worn cameras to stop motorists and improperly search their vehicles.
Police investigators said in the case file that they identified hundreds of stops that were not properly documented, along with failures by the officers to activate their body and dashboard cameras.
The allegations against Cancino largely hinged on two stops, according to his attorney. In May 2023, Cancino and his partner pulled over a man for allegedly speeding and having tinted windows, said his attorney, Nicole Castronovo. The vehicle’s registration was expired, Castronovo said, but the driver was allowed to leave without a citation after the officers searched his vehicle and found nothing incriminating.
When interviewed about the incident later, according to Castronovo, the motorist told police investigators that Cancino had stopped him because ”I looked like a G,” or gangster.
A few months later, the attorney said, Cancino was involved in another questionable stop, this time of a pedestrian who also later lodged a complaint alleging he was profiled.
Castronovo denied that Cancino had unfairly targeted anyone while on the job, saying he is a proud Latino who joined the force out of a desire to give back to the city where he grew up. She argued that the department’s investigators cherry-picked cases involving Cancino while ignoring similar behavior by other Mission cops.
“They have set up a system where it’s virtually impossible to sustain a biased policing complaint against an officer,” she said. “And then they turn around and weaponized” it against Cancino.
The probe’s findings were presented to LAPD leadership, who recommended that Cancino be fired and sent to a disciplinary hearing.
Castronovo argued in an appeal that her client and another fired Mission officer, Kim Lobos, had been denied a fair disciplinary hearing because both were initially represented by a lawyer appointed by the police union who had a conflict of interest. According to Castronovo, the union attorney also represented other Mission officers who agreed to testify against Cancino and Lobos. A Los Angeles County judge rejected their appeal.
Only one other LAPD officer prior to Cancino was fired for alleged racial profiling, a case that occurred in 2011.
According to the California Department of Justice, 4,878 allegations of bias were brought against LAPD officers from 2016 to 2025. Of those, only three were sustained.
The department’s rates mirror those of most other law enforcement agencies across the state. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which received roughly 10% fewer complaints over than span, has sustained six racial bias allegations against deputies.
Defenders of the Police Department note that any member of the public is allowed to submit a complaint whether or not there is supporting evidence, which leads to a high number of allegations that cannot be proved. Others note that the presence of body-worn cameras has helped disprove frivolous claims filed by criminal suspects or others who have an ax to grind with the department.
A report released last year by the advocacy group Catalyst California found that in 2025, Black motorists accounted for nearly a third of all stops for minor traffic violations, even though they make up roughly 8% of the city’s population. The same report found that Latinos, who are about 47% of L.A.’s population, were pulled over in 58% of all traffic stops.
Latino people are up to four times more likely to be subjected to “consent” searches, and Black people up to three times as likely, according to the Catalyst study. Fewer than 1 in 10 of those stops resulted in seizures of guns or drugs, the report said.
LAPD officials have pushed back on the findings, saying there is no established methodology for analyzing racial profiling data. Many factors affect the racial and ethnic patterns of traffic stops — such as the predominant race of the neighborhood in which the stop was made, or whether the stop resulted in an arrest and conviction — all of which must be considered when interpreting raw data, officials say.
The Los Angeles City Council voted to limit ‘pretextual’ stops, which have been blamed for racial disparities in enforcement, calling on police oversight officials to quickly adopt new policies.
In May, the Los Angeles City Council voted in favor of limiting the use of “pretextual” stops, in which police use a broken taillight or another minor equipment violation as justification to pull someone over in order to investigate whether a more serious crime has occurred. Activists and some council members said they wanted to ban a controversial tactic that enabled racial discrimination. The measure urges the Police Commission, which is responsible for LAPD policy changes, to take up the issue this year.
The LAPD’s unwillingness to acknowledge officer biases and hand down punishment when warranted serves only to drive a wedge between the community and the department, said Peter Bibring, a civil rights and police practices attorney.
“The department, year after year after year, is saying, ‘Nope this never happens, this never happens,’” Bibring said. “Then the community doesn’t feel like the department is recognizing these legitimate problems and responding to their concerns.”
During a deposition for a racial profiling lawsuit filed over a 2019 traffic stop, an LAPD official was asked what evidence it would take to get someone fired.
The attorney for the plaintiff, a Black man who sued claiming he was pulled over by three gang officers who handcuffed him and allegedly searched his vehicle without probable cause, asked: “If you found out that a given officer had pulled over 2,000 people in the last year, and all 2,000 of them were Black, would you have enough information, sitting here today, to determine whether or not that data alone indicated that the officer was engaged in biased policing?”
The LAPD official’s response, according to the deposition transcript: “No.”
An initiative by Los Angeles officials to figure out how to test plans to remove police from traffic enforcement is running behind schedule — again.
Jim Willis, a former LAPD detective who later worked for the L.A. Police Commission’s inspector general’s office, pointed to past audits that found serious shortcomings in the department’s investigations of racial bias complaints. Furthermore, he said, many people who are affected never file claims because they don’t understand laws around consent searches — or they are just relieved when officers let them go.
Even when someone bothers to file a complaint, Willis said, it’s difficult to gather enough evidence from a brief interaction to prove an officer made a traffic stop solely because of race. If there was a minor traffic infraction or other probable cause to make a stop, proving their motive requires them to confess to acting with intent to discriminate, Willis said.
That’s why most claims are dismissed by LAPD investigators, he said, “unless, you caught somebody on their body-worn video saying, ‘Hey tonight we’re going out and we’re [pulling over] brothers.’”
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