City Atty Loses Bid to Criminalize Man Punched During Traffic Stop; Diversion Agreement Paves Way for Civil Proceedings Against City, LAPD to Resume

Last month, lawyers for the City of L.A. and Alexander Donta Mitchell – the man who LAPD officer Joshua Sportiello pulled out of his car, searched, handcuffed, punched in the face, hogtied, and arrested for being double parked on a quiet side street in Watts in July of 2024 – reached an agreement regarding misdemeanor charges that Mitchell had resisted, obstructed, and/or delayed a police officer and/or emergency medical technician: diversion to anger management training, community labor, and two years’ probation.

The diversion is actually a positive step, says Mitchell’s lawyer, attorney Brad Gage. It allows the civil case Mitchell brought against the City – which had been stayed until the criminal case was resolved – to resume. It prevents Mitchell from having a criminal conviction on his record. And it keeps the City from being able leverage the criminal charges against Mitchell if the civil case goes to trial.

In that regard, the agreement also deals a blow to the office of Los Angeles City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto.

As Streetsblog first reported earlier this year, her office slapped Mitchell with the two misdemeanor resisting charges on June 13, 2025, eleven months after his arrest. Mitchell’s lawyers and his family contended – then and now – that the charges were vindictive and filed in retaliation for their decision to sue the city.

At the time, Feldstein Soto’s office did not respond to Streetsblog’s questions about the decision to file. But the timing of the charges was hard to ignore. Back in August of 2024, when then-District Attorney George Gascón declined to file felony resisting charges against Mitchell, the City Attorney opted to do nothing. Then, in December of 2024, Mitchell filed a civil suit against the City and Sportiello for unlawful seizure, civil battery, negligence, and the violation of his constitutional rights. Just as the discovery process was getting underway, the City Attorney – who is defending both the City and Sportiello in the civil case – finally made her move. The misdemeanor filings came in just under the wire – charges (generally) must be filed within a year of an incident. Predictably, the civil case was stayed until the criminal case was resolved.

The diversion agreement takes the criminal charges off the table; they can’t be used to justify Sportiello’s aggression and brutality.

That said, the charges still add to the toll the incident has taken on Mitchell. In addition to the trauma of the assault, the physical injuries he sustained, and the medical bills, costs of retrieving his impounded car, and time lost going back and forth to court, he will likely be required to do 8 to 12 hours of anger management coursework and somewhere between 50 and 200 hours of community labor. He’ll also have two full years’ worth of regular check-ins with a probation officer. All for asking why he was being subjected to unlawful actions during a violently aggressive pretext stop.

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One Officer Plus Three Black Men Yields Two Complaints (that we know of) and Two Lawsuits in Four Months’ Time

Given the City Attorney’s activism in this case, it is worth revisiting just who and what her office and LAPD are working so hard to defend.

LAPD’s pretextual stop policy should have prevented Sportiello from being able to leverage the double-parking infraction Mitchell had committed on a quiet Watts side street into a full-scale detention, use of force, arrest, and vehicle impound.

Approved in March of 2022, the policy effectively ended traffic/pedestrian/bike stops for minor equipment violations or other infractions (like double parking), except in cases where the violation in question “significantly interfere[d] with public safety.” It also limited pretextual stops – the use of a minor traffic violation as a pretext to investigate a more serious unrelated crime – to scenarios where “officers [were] acting upon articulable information” regarding a crime with potential for great bodily injury or death.

But instead of leaving Mitchell be or asking him to find a better parking spot, Sportiello opened Mitchell’s door and demanded he step out of the vehicle. Then he continued to escalate the encounter, grabbing Mitchell by the arm to spin him around and pat him down for weapons while refusing to provide any justification for the stop – something required by law – beyond “You were ignoring me.”

Instead of answering Mitchell’s questions about why Sportiello was treating him this way or heeding Mitchell’s repeated request for a supervisor, Sportiello, with the help of partner officer Luther Lordeus, slapped one handcuff on Mitchell, yelled at him to put his hands behind his back, threatened to tase him, and finally sucker punched him in the jaw.

At the time, Craig Lally, the head of the police union, declared that “sometimes placing someone into handcuffs gets physical” and that “it is the suspect’s actions that most often times dictates the level of physicality.”

But Mitchell had committed no crime. There was no reason to place him in handcuffs to begin with. Moreover, the extended body cams LAPD released make clear this was Sportiello’s default level of physicality.

After getting fed up with Mitchell’s efforts to talk to bystanders, Sportiello took Mitchell to the ground.

He then approached concerned bystanders, physically shoved them in the chest multiple times, and actually sizzled his taser at them (below at the 13-second mark).

When Mitchell repeatedly begged a rookie officer to keep Sportiello away from him, Sportiello yanked on Mitchell’s arm and dragged him away.

When, after Sportiello again tried to shove him in the patrol vehicle, Mitchell collapsed and complained that he couldn’t breathe, Sportiello dragged him by his legs. Then he insisted on hobbling Mitchell and waved off other officers’ attempts to intervene (below), saying, “We’re not playing games with this guy.”

Even after EMTs had arrived and it was clear that Mitchell being hogtied impeded their ability to properly get him on the gurney, Sportiello insisted that he remain hobbled, saying Mitchell was “playing hard to get.” If Mitchell was uncomfortable, that was his problem, Sportiello told another rookie. “We’re not on his program.”

Then Sportiello tightened the handcuffs.

Mitchell wasn’t the only person Sportiello bullied and assaulted that year.

The lawsuit filed by South L.A. Cafe owner Joe Ward-Wallace contends Sportiello had battered him a few months earlier, on April 11, 2024, when Ward-Wallace had approached him to complain about another officer that he had just seen driving recklessly.

Instead of assisting the 62-year-old, the complaint reads, Sportiello stepped on and injured Ward-Wallace’s foot, shoved him in the chest, and arrested him for “battery on an officer.” The complaint also alleges Sportiello and partner officer Edward Pedroza then put Ward-Wallace in the back of their patrol vehicle, clipped him in with a faulty seat belt, and proceeded to purposefully drive in such a manner that Ward-Wallace was violently tossed around inside the vehicle, incurring further injury. Just as in Mitchell’s case, there was a further price to pay: Ward-Wallace claims he was held in jail for five days, placed in solitary confinement, ignored when he called for help during a panic attack, and given roach-infested food. [*According to PACER, the parties settled on June 28, 2026, just as the case was about to go to trial. Christian Contreras, the lawyer for Ward-Wallace, says they cannot provide details at present as the settlement is still pending with the City.]

And in June of 2024 – just one month before he punched Mitchell – Sportiello pulled a young Black man over, asked him about his parole/probation status, and refused to tell him why he had been stopped. Then, as the 22-year-old reached for the documents Sportiello told him to retrieve, Sportiello opened the car door, grabbed his wrist, and threatened to physically pull him out of the vehicle. Not only did Sportiello then proceed to conduct an unlawful search, per the complaint investigation and resolution (available courtesy of William Gude/FilmthePoliceLA), investigators ultimately concluded he had also lied to them about his motivations for doing so and sustained the complaint.

Of note, Sportiello also appears have lied when reporting the specifics of the stop. In the official data LAPD submits to the Attorney General’s Office in accordance with the Racial Identity Profiling Act, the search justifications are listed as officer safety and a parole compliance check, both of which are contradicted by the complaint investigation. [See the isolated data entry for the June 16, 2024 stop here.]

Despite what he has cost these men and the hundreds of thousands of dollars (or much more) he is likely to cost the City, the costs to Sportiello seem to have been relatively low. He was not disciplined for the unlawful search or for his mistreatment of the young man he pulled over. The outcome of the excessive force complaint filed in the Mitchell case is unknown. And instead of becoming persona non grata in the department after the assault on Mitchell stirred national outrage, the Rampart division – where Sportiello resurfaced two months later – made a pointed show of embracing him and his troubled track record with open arms.

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This story is part of an occasional series exploring pretext stops.