SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIALS
Chapter 11: The Routine Traffic Stop
Key Quotes
“...the investigatory traffic stop is not about traffic safety. It is not related to some theory of public well-being that correlates broken taillights and lapsed registration with traffic deaths. The investigatory traffic stop is about using traffic laws to stop a vehicle in order to make contact with the humans inside.” — Click to Tweet
“Park a police cruiser in an upscale suburban neighborhood, and that officer could continuously conduct investigative traffic stops based on the violations they observe. And when they pulled people over for minor infractions, if they were tenacious and so inclined, they would occasionally uncover evidence of more serious criminal activity. Soccer moms rolling through stop signs or driving a few miles over the speed limit are not perceived as warranting this kind of policing, and that has nothing to do with traffic safety.”
“The decision by a police officer to intervene is then, nearly always, completely discretionary. The officer decides when, where, and under what circumstances they will enforce traffic laws. This makes traffic enforcement arbitrary; a random occurrence that is largely unrelated to safe driving.”
“If we want to keep police officers and the public safe while reducing the number of negative interactions with law enforcement, and if we desire a country where the rules not only matter but their enforcement is fair and equitably applied, then we need to end the routine traffic stop.”
“Law enforcement cannot compensate for bad road and street design.” — Click to Tweet
Springfield, Massachusetts Arrest Logs
From Confessions of a Recovering Engineer:
Springfield is a difficult place to be in law enforcement. Various rankings put Springfield in a category of “most dangerous” city, something many residents will dispute but for which there is statistical evidence to support. Both violent and non-violent crime in Springfield is consistently above both state and national averages.
The flash point for much of this crime is the routine traffic stop. I reviewed a week of Springfield’s arrest reports and found that, of the 42 individuals arrested, half of them were charged with some traffic-related offense or were booked simultaneously, and with related charges, to someone who was.iv It seems reasonable to assume that the latter were likely passengers in the same vehicle.
See Springfield’s arrest logs here.
Asset Forfeiture Abuse
From the ACLU:
Police abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws has shaken our nation’s conscience. Civil forfeiture allows police to seize — and then keep or sell — any property they allege is involved in a crime. Owners need not ever be arrested or convicted of a crime for their cash, cars, or even real estate to be taken away permanently by the government.
Forfeiture was originally presented as a way to cripple large-scale criminal enterprises by diverting their resources. But today, aided by deeply flawed federal and state laws, many police departments use forfeiture to benefit their bottom lines, making seizures motivated by profit rather than crime-fighting. For people whose property has been seized through civil asset forfeiture, legally regaining such property is notoriously difficult and expensive, with costs sometimes exceeding the value of the property.
Learn more at the ACLU’s website.
Speeding Cops
“We haven’t seen a single person that was doing the speed limit here.”
Michael Odiari: Putting a Check on Deadly Traffic Stops (Podcast)
Michael Odiari is the founder and chief innovation officer of Check, an app that seeks to make traffic stops safer and simpler. In its current form, Check allows a driver to record their interactions with law enforcement, notify an emergency contact, and pull up a digital ID so that the driver does not have to reach for a physical version in their pockets or glove compartment. But for Odiari, Check is not just an app, it’s a movement. Check out this interview Charles Marohn did with Michael Odiari.