When Dorrell Battles and his brother Terrell were pulled over by Akron police for expired registration tags in June 2024, they were stopped by officers who were equipped with the prescribed solutions to racial bias and unjustified use-of-force in policing, including implicit bias training and body-worn cameras.
Neither of these “solutions” kept officer Warren Spragg IV from dragging Terrell, the passenger, out of the car and punching him until his nose was broken and face bloodied. Body camera footage relays the officer’s contempt as he tells Terrell that he doesn’t “even need a reason” to take him out of the car; later, in response to bystanders saying they caught everything on camera, an officer motions to his chest and says “it’s on all the cameras.” He’s right—there were multiple body cameras recording the encounter, and the footage released by the police department shows everything from multiple angles.
Spragg graduated from an Akron police academy after Ohio began requiring training on implicit bias and de-escalation. The month after he was sworn in, the Akron City Council unanimously approved a package of policing reforms, including a resolution calling for implicit bias training for all officers. And as evidenced by the footage, Spragg is comfortable wearing a body-worn camera—Akron police officers have been wearing them since 2017, when a grant from the Department of Justice helped the city become the first in Ohio to equip all officers with cameras.
And yet punching is a regular practice for Spragg during traffic stops. Months after he attacked Terrell, the city of Akron finally settled a federal civil rights lawsuit involving Spragg punching another Black man in the face the summer before. Both of these cases—as well as Spragg’s twenty-five other use-of-force incidents between January 2023 and August 2024—occurred within a police department that had already adopted the changes offered by mainstream reformers and politicians.
Implicit bias training does not actually reduce racial disparities in policing. Researchers analyzing the effect of NYPD’s implicit bias training on more than 14,000 officers between 2018 and 2019 found it failed to reduce racial and ethnic disparities in stops, searches, arrests, or use-of-force. In a 2019 follow-up survey, 42 percent of surveyed officers said they had not even attempted to apply the training in the previous month. Similarly, empirical research—not to mention the continued recurrence of stories like Terrell’s—has undermined the claim that body-worn cameras prevent officers from escalating routine stops into violent encounters. Nor do cameras automatically ensure accountability after instances of police violence and excessive use of force; Spragg remains on patrol today.
A markedly different approach to preventing racial bias and use of force in policing is being implemented to great effect in jurisdictions across the country. Rather than trying to “fix” policing, this approach demonstrates that the surest way to prevent police violence is to eliminate the occasions to inflict it. Pretext stop policies move beyond failed reforms and take a new approach: Instead of trying to change the way individual officers think, why don’t we restrict their ability to act on their biases?
Pretext traffic stops are one of the most common and consequential ways police officers exercise discretion and act on racial bias. These stops—in which officers pull drivers over for low-level traffic violations, such as expired registration tags, often as an excuse to fish for evidence of unrelated crimes—overwhelmingly target people of color and are regularly escalated by police. According to the New York Times, from 2017 to 2021, police killed more than 400 unarmed civilians in these types of stops—a rate of more than a death a week.
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In 2022 organizers in San Francisco, where I live, began pushing for an end to racially motivated traffic stops in the city, where Black residents were nearly six times more likely to be stopped by police in 2020 than white residents. Similar efforts across the country gained momentum in the early 2020s as renewed attention focused on widespread, disproportionate racial profiling in traffic stops.
The San Francisco Police Commission began considering a policy that would restrict police officers from using a handful of low-level traffic violations as the sole reason for a stop. The policy generated substantial pushback from the city’s police union, which claimed it would handcuff their officers and allow “drug dealers, gang members, and human traffickers” to take advantage of them. These claims were dubious even as they were being made, with research later showing that fewer than 1 percent of pretext stops lead to the discovery of a gun. Ultimately, and in spite of a legal challenge by the police union, San Francisco’s pretext stop policy passed and was effective across the city beginning July 17, 2024.
My recently published research in the Berkeley Public Policy Journal tested two competing theories of what San Francisco’s pretext stop policy would do. Organizers argued that restricting police from making stops for low-level traffic violations would reduce racial disparities by removing the discretion that allows officers to act on their hunches. The police union claimed these restrictions would strip officers of a key investigative tool.
My findings show that pretext stop restrictions in San Francisco immediately led to large, statistically significant reductions in stops and searches for Black and Latino drivers in the city—all without generating changes in drug, gun, or contraband discoveries. Latino drivers saw a 68 percent reduction in weekly pretext stops immediately after policy implementation, while Black drivers saw a nearly 50 percent decrease. These large reductions reversed the previous trend, which was steady increases in pretext stops across all racial groups and held constant even after accounting for changes in crime rates, police staffing levels, and driving activity in the city.
The findings from San Francisco join a growing body of evidence from cities that have restricted pretext stops. In Fayetteville, North Carolina, former police chief Harold Medlock redirected his department away from low-level stops more than a decade ago. Researchers have since found that this redirection led to meaningful reductions in racial disparities in stops with no detectable increase in violent or property crime. In Ramsey County, Minnesota—where in 2021 the county attorney’s office implemented a policy refusing to prosecute charges arising from pretext stops—evaluators found narrower racial gaps in who was stopped and searched, without any apparent public-safety cost.
According to the Vera Institute of Justice, at least sixteen cities across the country, including Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Seattle, have implemented comprehensive policies limiting a wide range of non‑safety‑related traffic stops, and Virginia was the first state to do so in 2021. As research continues to emerge, we see that targeting officer discretion can achieve what hundreds of millions of dollars spent on implicit bias training and body-worn cameras have been unable to. Moreover, empirical evidence demonstrates that you cannot meaningfully reform the scale of discriminatory policing—you can only reduce the scale of policing itself. Pretext stop policies are a key component to achieving this reduction, but not the only one: alternative response programs and civilian traffic enforcement are part of the same project, which seeks to replace police encounters rather than refine them.
Shifting interventions away from individual officers and onto the mechanisms they use to act on their biases is a structural change, not one that formalizes our status quo. Initiatives like implicit bias training and body-worn cameras target the individual, hoping that officers—when watched by their cameras—will police themselves into good behavior. At their worst, body-worn cameras offer the guise of justice and accountability while providing police a tool to cover their bases and continue operating as they always have. The belief that equipping police with technology can eliminate bias is both mistaken and dangerous—an illusion we must resist, especially as the array of carceral technologies available to law enforcement continues to grow.
The debate between these approaches continues to shape policing policy today, most notably in Los Angeles. While the city passed a pretext stop restriction in 2022, the policy left broad room for police discretion, allowing officers to make minor pretext stops if they deemed a violation “significantly interferes with public safety.” That single clause—and the discretion it gives officers—separates meaningful policy from failed reforms of the past. Los Angeles’ 2022 policy was ultimately insufficient, as officers used discretion to continue conducting racially motivated stops and searches. In 2025, several years after the policy went into effect, Black people accounted for 31 percent of all stops for minor violations while comprising 8 percent of the city’s population.
On May 6 the Los Angeles City Council directed the Police Commission to adopt a new pretext stop policy, this time sharply narrowing officer discretion, explicitly restricting stops for vehicle equipment and non-moving/administrative violations “except in cases where the violation poses a significant and imminent safety risk.” The policy will now go to the Police Commission, where it is expected to draw strong challenges from the LAPD and the department’s union. Just as in San Francisco, various law enforcement leaders in Los Angeles claim pretext stops are essential, insisting that they “remain an important investigative tool” and that they allow officers to “be proactive in preventing crime.” The sheer size of Los Angeles presents tremendous opportunity—if the policy makes it through the Police Commission, nearly 4 million people will live in a city where the routine traffic encounters that have for decades been used to target, harass, and terrorize people of color have been legislated out of existence.
For too long, the question has been how to make police officers better. But the evidence has long suggested that the most effective way to reduce the harms of policing is not to perfect police encounters, but to prevent them in the first place. Restrictions on pretext stops are a strong step in that direction.
Image: Jakob Rosen / Unsplash
