Pretextual Stops

Traffic stops have long played an outsize role in American policing. Akhi Johnson, director of the Reshaping Prosecution Initiative at Vera, told Jacobin that this is no coincidence.

“Not only are police trained that those are stressful situations, they are also trained to use them as investigative tactics to try to ferret out evidence and that traffic stops are this incredible public safety tool,” Johnson said.

Johnson, a former assistant US attorney, said that traffic stops fall into two categories: what police officers describe as “must-stop” situations, where a person is driving recklessly or endangering the safety of other people on the road, and “can stop” situations, where a person is not endangering anyone’s safety but an officer decides to pull them over anyway for a reason often tenuously related or completely unrelated to public health.

Pretextual stops, in which officers pull over drivers for a minor traffic-related infraction in order to investigate them for an unrelated offense, fall into the latter category — and it’s those stops that disproportionately impact people of color and low-income neighborhoods. A study of fourteen years of traffic stop data in North Carolina found that black drivers were 95 percent more likely than white drivers to be pulled over and 115 percent more likely than white drivers to be searched during a stop, even though searches of white drivers more often uncovered contraband.

“The real damage in that is if you’re a driver, and you were speeding way over the limit and you get pulled over, you get it — you know you weren’t supposed to be doing it [and] it doesn’t tend to impact your perceptions of law enforcement,” Johnson said. “When you aren’t doing anything wrong and you get pulled over time and time again, it erodes your trust in law enforcement, it erodes your trust in government, and that makes all of us less safe.”

Johnson’s claim has empirical backing. A recent study conducted in Tampa found that getting stopped by police makes a person less likely to vote — a point that Ervin argues underscores how policing, like the rest of the carceral system, is used as a method of exerting social control and effectively excluding certain groups of people from the democratic process.

In few places was that clearer than in Ferguson, Missouri, in the lead-up to the killing of Michael Brown. A study conducted by the St Louis nonprofit Better Together found that court fees made up a quarter of Ferguson’s budget, giving police officers an effective imperative to pull drivers over in a scheme that former St Louis alderman Antonio French described as “taxation by citation.” In 2013, the year before Brown was killed, 86 percent of police stops in Ferguson and 92 percent of searches were of black people.

Reform Measures

There is an emerging consensus in major cities that these “can stop” traffic stops aren’t doing anything to improve public safety. San Francisco is one of a number of cities that have recently moved to limit the circumstances under which officers can make pretextual stops — banning officers from making stops for low-level offenses like driving without working taillights or driving with an item hanging from a mirror. The San Francisco order also limits when officers can ask to search a person’s vehicle or ask investigatory questions following a stop to when they have concrete evidence of criminal activity.

“The overall goal is to be smart about how we use the limited law enforcement resources that we have,” Max Carter-Oberstone, vice president of the San Francisco police commission, told Jacobin. “A huge volume of our stops are for low-level offenses that don’t pose any threat to people on our roadways, and for which we are not recovering guns, drugs, or making arrests. These stops are just a horribly inefficient use of our law enforcement resources.”

Philadelphia and Pittsburgh have also passed laws limiting the use of pretextual stops. Minneapolis two years ago began exploring the creation of an unarmed Traffic Safety division that would take traffic law enforcement away from the city’s police department following public safety logic popularized during the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising; Berkeley has attempted to institute a similar plan but has thus far been stopped by California state law.

A handful of national politicians are beginning to pick up the picture as well — a bill introduced in the US House by Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York would establish a $100 million annual grant program for cities that reassign traffic law enforcement to unarmed officers or technology. The fact that police unions in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are fighting limitations on their traffic stop powers suggests in itself that the stops serve a purpose aside from public safety.

Whether or not reassigning the work of policing away from police would make a decisive long-term impact remains to be seen. But if limiting the police officers’ ability to make arbitrary stops is important because it limits their ability to spin those stops into other charges and fines, it’s also important because there is scant evidence that any other sort of police reform measure effectively cuts down on police violence. The officers who beat Nichols were all black. They wore body cameras. They were armed, but they didn’t use their guns. None of it mattered.

“Police are trained to read the need for force in most situations,” Ervin said. “That is actually core to what their function is. It’s the actual act of policing that leads to the violent police encounter. Yes, it’s the cops, but more it’s doing cop work.”