Beginning in two thousand and two, the city of New York implemented a crime fighting program known as "stop and frisk" in which the police were allowed, without probable cause, to stop, question and possibly search criminal suspects on the street. Within a few years, hundreds of thousands of people were being stopped by the program each year. Inevitably, the program proved controversial, with its "guilty until proven innocent" attitude being used disproportionately against men of color. The program began to lose popularity when lawsuits began to filed against the police department, and since twenty fourteen, the number of people stopped under the program dwindled to around a little over ten thousand. Now that the harassment of people walking down the street has been curtailed, can we start using the same principal for people driving too?
Recently, as the emotional Eric Chauvin trial continued, there were two recent incidents of violence committed by police officers on men of color that started with cars being pulled over. The first happened in Minnesota, when twenty year old Daunte Wright was shot and killed by a twenty six year veteran officer who claimed that she was reaching for her taser gun and accidentally pulled her pistol instead. Wright had been pulled over for hanging an air freshener on his rear view mirror. The second incident was less tragic but still shocking; in Virginia Caron Nazario, an off duty member of the military, was pulled over, harassed and pepper sprayed because the police wrongly thought that his car's license was expired.
The tragically routine nature of these two incidents just highlight the absurdity of having armed law enforcement officers pull over cars for minor infractions. Why do we have the police wasting their time and the taxpayers dollars going after people who are not endangering the lives of others? Many intersections have cameras, and when people make a wrong turn or run a red light, they take a picture of the car and send them a ticket in the mail. Police and parking attendants have cameras, so why don't they do the same thing? Sure, if a person is driving recklessly or appears to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, then it's fine for the police to pull that person over, given that they are a danger to themselves or others. (And even in that case the police should film the reckless driving to prove the need to pull the driver over). But for running a stop sign when there's no pedestrians around? For failing to signal soon enough? It's an overreach for the people who are supposed to protect and serve the public.
Since two thousand and fifteen, the Stanford Open Policing Project has sifted through the data of over two hundred million police stops, and their findings are far from surprising: African Americans are more likely to pulled over than white people across the country. And after the pull over is made, they are also more likely to be searched, and, of course, more likely to have force used against them. Speaking for myself as a white man, I have been stopped for running stop signs four times in my life, and I was never asked to get out of my car or verbally harassed in anyway. Compare that to Philando Castile, an African American man who was shot and killed during a routine pull over in twenty sixteen; in his thirteen years of driving he had been pulled over forty nine times.
America has the highest prison population in the world (and the highest per capita), and thirty eight percent of that population are African American, despite them making only thirteen percent of the population. The inherently racist nature of our legal system in this country is, of course, not just the fault of the police themselves. It has a long sad history, from feed slaves being jailed on trumped up charges and then forced into prison labor, to the unfair enforcement and sentencing laws of the war on drugs, to the privatization of prisons in the nineteen eighties, which gave us corporate for profit prisons that lobbied congress for tougher sentencing laws. Obviously, reforms of not just the police department are needed in the future to make America a more just society. But one simple place to start is to stop having the police pull over someone because they have a air freshener on their rear view mirror. There's no excuse for it.
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