Excellent opinion piece in today’s Washington Post. Does anyone know whether changes like this could be done at a federal level? Or would this change have to come at the state or local level?
Opinion: Traffic enforcement is broken in the U.S. Here’s how we can fix it.
Excerpts from this article:
If we are serious about preventing needless deaths and routine humiliation of Black and Latino drivers at the hands of police, we need to change how we promote traffic safety in the United States.
Police make 20 million traffic stops every year. That means millions of opportunities for things to go tragically wrong, as they did not only for Daunte Wright this month in Minnesota but also for Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Walter Scott and countless others who escaped with their lives but whose lives nonetheless were forever impacted.
…
There are at least three things we can do to reduce the harm and racial disparities of traffic enforcement without compromising public safety.
First, we can take much of traffic enforcement out of the hands of police. Some places are shifting traffic enforcement to unarmed traffic safety experts. Relatedly, we can make better use of transportation design and technology. There are legitimate concerns about where red-light and speed cameras are placed, but I’ve never seen one pepper-spray a motorist or show a strange proclivity for targeting Black drivers when it was light enough to see skin color. This shift would reserve police stops for immediate threats — such as drunken driving — that arguably require a police response.
Second, cities and states should reject pretext stops, by prohibiting their use, reducing the infractions for which police can stop people, and cleaning up often-antiquated vehicle codes to remove violations that have little to do with public safety and everything to do with allowing police to stop people at will. Pro tip: Prohibiting air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors is not motivated by a traffic safety concern.
Third, cities should shift the resources currently used for our harm-inefficient traffic enforcement system to evidence-informed programs for preventing gun violence and reducing the harm of illicit drugs.
Given that Whren came out of Washington, the D.C. police would be a worthy candidate for leading this change. Indeed, the D.C. Police Reform Commission recently provided a road map for how to reduce the harm of traffic enforcement. Other jurisdictions are innovating as well. We should encourage and learn from those efforts to create a traffic safety system that does not kill and humiliate.
Does anyone know whether changes like this could be done at a federal level? Or would this change have to come at the state or local level?
lowtechcyclist
First…
One thing I keep thinking of is the fact that the office of county sheriff is usually an elected office. That means the sheriff doesn’t directly report to any civilian leadership.
That strikes me as an invitation for abuse, and ISTM that they all too often gleefully accept that invitation. It doesn’t make any more sense that sheriffs have that sort of independence than for, say, the generals and admirals at the top of our military hierarchy to have that sort of independence.
All police should have to report to civilian leadership. Period.
Major Major Major Major
FYI you ask your questions twice in this post.
Spanky
I have a problem with the starting assumption that “traffic enforcement” is actually being performed here. I’m assuming straight up harassment until shown otherwise.
Spanky
@lowtechcyclist: Are you saying Mike Evans might be abusing his office? This is my shocked face.
Old School
How is the “traffic safety experts” idea being implemented? Do they still drive police cars?
Roger Moore
One thing I find mildly disappointing about the editorial is that it talks about governments using traffic fines as a revenue source, but doesn’t go anywhere with it. Making law enforcement of any kind into a revenue source for the government is a prescription for massive overenforcement. We need to make sure the police force, and ideally the local government, doesn’t benefit from traffic fines. Put them in the state general fund rather than letting the local government keep them. Traffic fines by the state police could be divided among local governments.
mali muso
As a follow on, there needs to be some focus on decoupling city budgets from fees and fines that are made up from these petty traffic violations. It creates a financial incentive that is perverse. Vox article
Mark
Law enforcement agencies do traffic stops as a pretext for all kinds of things they don’t want to give up. Asset forfeiture is the most monstrous of these, but also background checks of drivers, visual inspections of the insides of cars… I’d be happy if this discussion at least drive them to admit this.
dnfree
@lowtechcyclist: You’re absolutely correct about county sheriffs. Elected, and according to many of them, they’re in the constitution and they don’t have to answer to anyone. They can be judge, jury, and executioner if they so choose.
At least in Illinois, county boards determine their budget, but that’s all.
Roger Moore
@mali muso:
I see that great minds think alike. This also ties into one of my other bugaboos: funding local government predominantly from local revenues. This is a great way of perpetuating inequality, since it guarantees poor areas have lousy government services. We’ve already recognized the problem by requiring the state government to provide adequate funding for local schools. Now we need to do the same for other essential government functions like infrastructure and public safety. Give every local government enough money to provide decent services, and they won’t need to resort to traffic fines to balance their books.
LeftCoastYankee
Traffic enforcement is just one of the places where racism in law enforcement shows itself, and technology will not solve racism.
I’m skeptical of the “unarmed traffic enforcers”. If cops say “he was driving erratically and flashing a gun” (i.e. looked black), the can still pull someone over.
Portland has enacted an unarmed (aka not the cops) first response team in a our “Lents” neighborhood. Earlier in the week, there was an article about them not getting enough referrals from 911. Then Friday the police shot a homeless man in Lents Park, because the 911 call said the man had a gun.
I think Guns and Racism are the problems, and anything which focuses solely on the symptoms of these problems will not be fruitful.
germy
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: I did that on purpose. :-)
I figured that increased the odds that all styles of readers would see my question, including the people who skip the post up top and jump down the comments.
Tractarian
@Roger Moore:
Yes! This is the obvious solution.
A federal law prohibiting traffic fines from going to law enforcement might be constitutionally dubious, but Congress can always withhold transportation funding from states that don’t comply.
WaterGirl
@Spanky: I think the opinion writer shares your view, as do I.
But either way, if you remove that as an option, deaths should go down.
Brachiator
I don’t disagree with some of these proposals, but the overall thrust seems to be “how can we change some traffic safety practices without acknowledging and fixing the racism that underlies the entire system?”
And yet it is acknowledged that many of these practices have absolutely nothing to do with public safety.
I am not sure what this means or how “illicit drugs” relates to anything at all.
WaterGirl
@Old School: Good question. Maybe someone else will know. I haven’t gotten that far.
Ohio Mom
I am not convinced that police are good at anything. They don’t seem to solve very many real crimes (robberies, rapes, etc.), and judging by the turkeys I share the road with, they don’t have much of an effect on driving habits, either (looking at you, Mr. Make an Abrupt Left Turn in Front of Me Mid-Intersection Without Blinkers, Stopping, Slowing Down or Any Other Warning this Morning).
WaterGirl
@mali muso: It’s like salespeople who have to bring in enough revenue to pay for themselves.
mali muso
@Roger Moore: Agreed. I saw your comment just after I posted mine.
WaterGirl
@germy: Business Insider is behind a paywall for me. Are there a couple of key paragraphs that you could block quote?
ET
Lots of smaller places need to raise money to pay for cops (and other things) and use traffic infractions to fill up city coffers. Then there are all the fines related to non payment of those things. So without that being dealt with as well, fixing traffic enforcement is only part of the fix.
Adam L Silverman
To answer your question, there is not a lot that the Federal government can do here. Unless Congress were to pass a law making it illegal for police to conduct traffic stops. Other than grants and other forms of funding from DOJ and DHS for specific law enforcement activities, decisions on what police do and how they do it is almost always set at the state and municipal levels. Which is why they are often used as supplemental revenue streams.
WaterGirl
@Brachiator:
I actually see that as a practical approach, a way of making some changes NOW. Because some rules could be changed NOW and that’s quicker than the fix to systemic racism.
The blatant abuse and murder of black people by authorities is such a big problem, that I see the value in pursuing multiple tracks toward change at the same time.
Roger Moore
@Tractarian:
A federal law prohibiting law enforcement from keeping fines would be constitutionally dubious, but there’s nothing from keeping state governments from doing so. The same thing with all kinds of fines; if we eliminate traffic fines but not other kinds, local governments will just go crazy with parking enforcement or something similar.
WaterGirl
@Adam L Silverman: I thought Tractarian at #14 made a good point as well:
Old School
@WaterGirl:
It’s a walkthrough of how to create a routine on an iPhone that does the specified activities: activates “Do Not Disturb”, sends a text of your location, starts recording on the camera.
Excerpts won’t accomplish much.
Roger Moore
@ET:
Yes. We need centralized funding of local governments so local governments don’t need to use fines to keep the coffers full. That said, traffic fines are an inefficient means of funding local government, so you wind up with a grossly oversized police department without actually providing decent services.
Adam L Silverman
@WaterGirl: Not going to happen.
I’m not trying to harsh your mellow on this, because this is an important discussion and I’m glad you’ve put it on the front page, but defunding this or that in a whackamole manner isn’t going to actually fix anything. It’ll just piss people off and lead to even worse outcomes. Look at the Brooklyn Center, MN police, Minnesota state police, and police sent from adjacent jurisdictions to assist in Brooklyn Center. They had to go and get a second Federal court order to force these cops to actually abide by a Federal court order issued last summer regarding not targeting, harassing, attacking, and/or arresting journalists. And they immediately ignored the second order just like they’ve been ignoring the original order.
I’ve spent the past week, on something else I’m working on, trying to actually figure out what it is police are supposed to do in the US in 2021. Not what they say they do and not what they actually are doing, but an actual concise set of declarative statements that actually define their actions as end states or objectives or effects to be achieved. I’ve looked at a lot of law enforcement agencies – sheriffs departments and police departments – mission statements. It is almost impossible to tease out actual objectives, end states, and/or effects to be achieved from these statements. Largely because they’re so general and anodyne.
Here’s one example copied and pasted from a sheriff department’s website:
Cheryl from Maryland
Here in Montgomery County, MD, aka a liberal hellhole, I’ve found over the last five years that intersections with frequent traffic accidents, such as bad U turns, bad free left turns with no arrows, etc., get changes in the traffic lights to stop these incidents. Because police resources need to be allocated elsewhere. Of course, we have a county income tax, so the County does not rely on penny ante crap to pay for basic services.
Plain Dave
gvg
@lowtechcyclist: the police are civilians. Don’t accept their military style reframing.
JaneE
Safety does need enforcement, but most of the stops I have seen don’t really require arrests. How you handle the cases that do is something that would need to be worked out. How you tell a lead-footed old lady from the woman who just helped her boyfriend shoot a guy is something else.
It is a standing joke that enforcement goes up when the coffers are empty, but it also seems to be true.
WaterGirl
None of these things that need to be changed will be easy to change, but if we don’t try, nothing changes.
gvg
What should police be stopping on sight?
An actual accident.
Drunk drivers.
Speeding in school zones.?
It seems like dash cams and tickets by mail can deal with most things but not all.
I think outlawing seizing money on suspicion it came from drugs. I’ve always thought that violated due process and there are plenty of stories of private sales of cars where people who don’t know each other are buying/selling a car and want to do it in cash but someone with $5000 in cash gets stopped and the cops confiscate it with no recourse for getting it back. That funds some police departments and I have also suspected it doesn’t all get to the department.
I think they need to have actual court processes and show cause to suspect which can’t be it’s a lot of cash or he’s black with a lot of cash. This also applies to some other property as well.
lowtechcyclist
@Spanky:
The problem is: if he was, the first I’d know about it would be when yet another of those horrific videos of a black person being killed for no reason at all, only this time here in Calvert County, surfaced.
Even if he were clean as a whistle, and his deputies a model of good and unbiased behavior, he and anyone in his position should still report directly to non-LEO leadership. There needs to be someone who’s not a cop, but who’d potentially lose their job for failing to adequately ride herd on the cops, if abuse rose to the level where everyone could see it.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us
My understanding is that in most of Western Europe most routine traffic infraction enforcement is done by camera + radar and they send you a fine by mail later. You don’t and won’t get stopped by the police for exceeding the speed limit, or making an illegal maneuver, within tolerances. I’m guessing that if a driver crosses a threshold into reckless driving the police will get involved, but otherwise you get a bill in the mail telling you when and where you were guilty of whatever infraction they’re fining you for. At least, that’s what my dad told me when I was driving the family around Sweden the summer before last. My wife has gotten a couple of those from DC for speeding in certain neighborhoods.
There is absolutely no reason this cannot be done and the fines could still be collected by the local government. Speed cameras are ever vigilant, so nobody guilty is going to get away with speeding because the cops aren’t sitting there at the speed trap. They won’t escalate things out of fear or pure power trip assholery because they’re incapable of harming people and don’t have emotions. It would free the police force up for doing more important things or just plain old mean a community needs fewer police. I know a lot of Americans think it’s an invasion of privacy or something but a camera taking a snapshot of your license plate is IMO a lot less intrusive than a cop pulling you over and taking all your information and writing a ticket (which is the best case scenario when a cop pulls you over).
The neat thing about the car we rented in Sweden is that it is somehow able to tell you not just how fast you are going but it tells you what the speed limit of the stretch of road you’re driving on is right there on the speedometer. So, like, you don’t have to search the side of the road for a speed limit sign because your car is telling you what the speed limit is at all times. I would love to be able to buy a car with that feature here in the States but so far as I know they don’t sell them like that here. But then my car is a half decade old so maybe they have that feature these days.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
For a lot of cops it seems that what they say and what they do are two distinctly different things.
For most citizens I’d bet law and order means – Obey the law.
For most cops I’d bet law and order means – Do what I fucking want.
40-50 yrs ago this was true for some cops, today I’d bet it’s most cops.
When I was getting to the end of my teen years I was trying to decide what I wanted to do for my life’s work. 2 of my friends wanted to be cops and I looked into this, even took a couple courses at community college. That was enough for me to see that I really did not want to be a cop, that and a ride along with one of those friends who was a couple yrs older and had become a deputy. It wasn’t the work or the people that had to be dealt with, it was the cops themselves. And today the other of those friends who did 30 yrs as a CHP who has told me that there is no way he would become a cop today, the concept of helping has been replaced with the concept of total policing, by which he meant cops today are the law and can and do things that he was taught he couldn’t do. It isn’t the same as it used to be, and it wasn’t all that great then. Remember that the population has grown a lot but the budget for cops hasn’t kept up and the things they buy now cost a lot more. An example, some motorcycle cops around here carry long arms, they didn’t used to.
And in their defense, with a lower number of cops/citizen, with the abundance of guns, even in CA, the danger level is up for them even if it were all in their heads. More cars, more guns, more people can make for huge problems even for a good force. How much does a cop car cost now?
Drdavechemist
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us:
If you have a smart phone, a navigation app like Waze or Google Maps will show the speed limit and can notify you if you are exceeding it. It can be annoying, but it is useful if you don’t know the local roads or regulations.
Mike G
@Ruckus:
For most cops I’d bet law and order means – Do what I fucking want.
Cops enforce their opinions, and occasionally the law. And they themselves break the law with impunity.
Bad cops put all cops in danger, because when the public expects capricious thuggery and potential violence from cops instead of a professional experience, it triggers defensive reactions that can escalate what should be an ordinary situation.
I have a friend who joined the CA Highway Patrol in the late 60s because he wanted to help people. He quit after he was ordered to stop and harass hippies for no reason.
pajaro
This article is where I am. The proposals don’t fix systemic racism, but they limit the harm it can do. To me the argument is not complex. The police make mistakes, and they have shown that their mistakes can be lethal. We should only risk lethal mistakes, even if they are infrequent, in situations where the police are intervening to protect us from the possibility of significant bodily harm. Armed police should not be involved in an interaction with citizens where the only issue is whether to issue a ticket. Pretextual stops should be outlawed. Police should not be using fines as a revenue enhancer. For those who worry about the loss of revenue, think about how much these communities will save when they don’t have to pay millions is civil settlements or unanticipated public safety expenses for police protection after the next unanticipated shooting. These changes may be difficult to pass in some places, but there is nowhere where these changes aren’t easier than defunding the police. And if people are opposed to this, the answer should be “you show me something that will make this stop that is doable,” and if you can’t, explain why you think doing nothing is better than my half-measure.
WaterGirl
@pajaro: Totally agree!
lowtechcyclist
@gvg:
I can see the point of this, but I have two problems with it.
The first is linguistic: there’s no other good way to say “everybody else besides law enforcement officers” that I can think of.
The second is practical: within the borders of the United States of America, these guys are in the position of being able to legally use way more firepower than the military can.
My next-door neighbor is in the USAF, but once he drives off of Joint Base Andrews to head for home, he is for all intents and purposes a civilian. He has no authority over me.
Law enforcement officers, OTOH, have rather substantial authority over me, which they can back up with the threat of bullets that can perforate my body and end my life. And this is true 24/7, whether they’re on or off duty. So to me, in daily life, they’re less civilian than the actual military are.
different-church-lady
@Brachiator: @WaterGirl: Really needs to be both, doesn’t it? Take away the tools of abuse and also reform the culture of abuse.
The first one, as WG points out, is absolutely an immediate imperative. But long-term it doesn’t break the better-mousetraps/better-mice cycle. Unless the culture changes they’ll always try to find another tool.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
Interesting point. And true.
@Mike G:
My buddy joined the CHP in 70/71, his report of his 30 yrs backs up yours. I also did a ride along about that time with the other buddy I talked about, who is a year older than me and he rapidly became my not friend during that ride along. He’d adopted all the behavior of the cop that IS the law, not the cop enforcing the law.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
I’ve wondered for decades how to reform that culture. That culture is seemingly innate in cops, from the top down. I think it’s possible not to be in the culture while a cop and some departments seem to have changed but I suspect that majority of the people who want to carry a gun and enforce law and order are more susceptible to this type of culture by the very nature of wanting the job. And I doubt that anything less than a complete overhaul of a department from the top down will work. As I commented above I know one ex cop who didn’t like the culture and stayed in in spite of it. Hence the top down rebuilding.
A side note is that in the military, at least when I was in, top down reform meant an officer whose presence was no longer desired was shipped off to the least desirable post that could be found for the rank and let everyone there suffer, until the offending shit was wiped off the books, usually by his retiring. I suffered under one of those. It was fun till I was discharged, at least that was what I told myself. Anything to do my part.