Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore announced Tuesday that, in light of financial constraints caused by the coronavirus outbreak, the department would stop using a controversial program that predicts where property crimes could occur throughout the city.

Critics say the predictive-policing program, called Pred-Pol, has led to heavier policing of minority neighborhoods. Moore has said in the past that he disagrees with the view that the program unfairly targets Latino and black neighborhoods.

“That is a hard decision,” Moore said during a Police Commission meeting conducted remotely by Zoom. “It’s a strategy we used, but the cost projections of hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on that right now versus finding that money and directing that money to other more central activities is what I have to do.”

Moore said he believed the underlying principles behind Pred-Pol were valid and that he’d be looking at other systems that crime analysts have to identify where crime is occurring. He said that a handbook on data-informed community policing that activists had been long awaiting was published on the LAPD’s website Monday.

Read the full story on LATimes.com.