The Case for Pretext Stops

I covered the death of Patricia McKay, a holiday from New Zealand, in my PJ Media column from monday. She was run over and killed on July 2 during an attempted robbery in Newport Beach, California. Leroy McCrary, one of the three suspects facing charges in the murder, was at least half the target of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s liberal policies, the most severe of which was a petition package that freed McCrary from prison after he pleaded guilty to a 2022 armed robbery in Santa Monica. McKay would still be alive today if McCrary had been imprisoned for the crime, as he would have been in most other jurisdictions in California.

But the crime raises other law enforcement issues tangential to the soft-on-crime policies favored by Gascón and other George Soros-funded “progressive” prosecutors. McKay was killed at the Newport Beach Fashion Island shopping center, which was frequently referred to as “upscale” in the news reports documenting her death. And indeed it is, as befits a city where the median household income is$ 149, 471 and the median home price is$ 2 million. The city’s population is also just 0.65 % black.

This is not to say that black shoppers are not to be found at Fashion Island, but merely to point out that McCrary, 26, and his two 18-year-old co-defendants, all of whom are black, would have been seen as extreme outliers among the mostly well-heeled patrons, and not solely because of their race. Consider: the Toyota Camry the three were in had no license plates, a violation of California law that, had the trio crossed paths with any police officers, would have warranted a traffic stop. &nbsp,

Patricia McKay’s gruesome death suffered by the officers would have been spared if they had found the gun if they had had probable cause to search the car. If not, all three of the gun’s possessors would have been detained. Any police officer with the title would have recognized McCrary and his two apprentices as three thugs out to kill.

Police officers in Newport Beach are still encouraged to carry out the proactive policing that leads to the discovery of weapons and deters predators like McCrary and his protégés from entering the field. Traffic stops are frequently conducted for minor offenses like missing license plates in this style of policing.

However, some would outlaw this kind of policing in the Bizzaro World of California in the name of” social justice.” Senate Bill 50, which would prohibit police officers from stopping for “low-level infractions,” is currently stalled in the California legislature. You can see the bill’s author, State Sen. Steven Bradford, a Democrat ( of course ) representing Gardena, discussing the bill here.

People of any race will not be any safer by exchanging so-called low-level infractions. As drivers start to profit from the lack of enforcement and the definition of “low-level infraction” becomes more restrictive, it will have the opposite effect. In many jurisdictions, law enforcement is already prohibited from carrying out traffic violation pursuits. Will they now be expected to ignore them altogether?

When I was a young street cop in South Los Angeles, my partner and I would play a little game every night when it was time to have code-7 ( dinner, for the uninitiated ). The first car to pass in front of the eating area would be treated to dinner by the other car if there was no collision damage. Sometimes there was a lengthy wait for a winner. &nbsp,

As a police officer in any city, one can identify, careless driving was the cause of every car’s dent. You can see the gloomy harvest that occurs when people feel free to disregard the law, especially among black people, since the George Floyd effect has hampered law enforcement in 2020.

It’s unfortunate that some lawmakers would have objected to those three predators on July 2 and that the police did n’t stop them before they killed Patricia McKay.

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