LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles Police Commission updated its policy on so-called “pretextual stops” on March 1 to discipline officers—beginning with additional training—if they don’t articulate at the moment why a traffic or other minor violation escalates into a criminal investigation. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) defines a pretextual stop as one in which officers escalate a minor traffic or code violation into an investigation of a more serious crime unrelated to the initial violation. According to the Office of the Inspector General, there were “pretty substantial racial disparities” in stops, many of which were pretextual stops, conducted by the department in 2019, and “a fairly small number of them yielded evidence of serious crimes or ended up resulting in any kind of arrests.” Those findings led the commission to request that the department update its policy, according to Commission President William Briggs. “Those pretextual stops do not result in guns …