Racial justice leaders are calling for an end to deadly traffic stops

Three racial justice leaders have joined forces to call on members of local, state and federal government to address a common problem: minor traffic stops that can escalate and result in injured or even dead civilians.

Two months after Tire Nichols died after being arrested by Memphis police officers at a traffic stop, city council members have passed new police reform ordinances that will change the way city police conduct police operations. traffic stops and will prohibit unmarked vehicles from engaging in stopping people.

Nicholas Turner, director and president of the Vera Institute of Justice, told HuffPost that police departments across the country can change the way they handle traffic stops “that have nothing to do with public safety.”

Turner, along with Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, and Patrick Gaspard, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, released a op-ed on CNN this week detailing why this change is necessary.

Police make about 20 million traffic stops each year, largely for issues like a broken taillight, and black drivers are disproportionately pulled over, they wrote. In addition to saying that individual police departments should make changes, the authors called on the US Department of Transportation, which provides funding for traffic safety programs, to address the problem.

“Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg should direct his department to disburse safety grants to localities that limit low-level traffic stops and rely on non-police traffic control methods, including civil traffic professionals that they can address road safety issues without the intimidation, and potential danger, of a license plate and a gun,” they wrote.

“We have seen the article and the Department takes this matter very seriously,” a Department of Transportation spokesperson told HuffPost. “We will continue to work to ensure that our road safety programs, including grant making, maintain both safety and fairness.”

Traffic stops are ineffective in addressing crime and have ultimately led to an increase in investigative stops and harassment of civilians, Turner said.

This was evident in the case of derrick kittling, an unarmed black man in Alexandria, Louisiana, who was arrested for having tinted windows in November. An officer deployed his Taser on Kittling and, after a brief struggle, fatally shot him in the head.

Turner said officers often don’t find any evidence of the violent crimes they claim to prevent.

TO study 2018 in Nashville on traffic stops for non-moving violations found that less than one-tenth of 1% (0.8 out of 1,000) resulted in police charging someone with possession of a weapon. another analysis of the Vera Institute of Justice found similar results with low-level stops in Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

Besides, Washington, DC, police recovered a weapon in 1% of traffic and pedestrian stops combined in 2020. In the prior year, there was a 0.6% recovery rate at all of those stops.

“We know that with that level of shutdowns, they are profoundly inefficient,” Turner said. “They are damaging any effort to produce public safety. It’s a poor deployment of resources.”