Auditors found tens of thousands of apparently falsified traffic stop records, many of white drivers. They suspect the officers were trying to appear more productive.
Auditors found tens of thousands of apparently falsified traffic stop records, many of white drivers. They suspect the officers were trying to appear more productive.
There should be no such thing as a routine traffic stop. That kind of adversarial police interaction should NOT be happening to citizens behaving normally. It should be reserved only for people behaving in a truly deviant way, which modest speeding is not. Normalizing this kind of interaction is part of what it means to be in a police state.
You can automate highway speed enforcement for a lot cheaper than the wage of police officers sitting and waiting at a trap all day, and will catch everyone instead of just a bunch of arbitrarily (or worse) chosen randos from the pack.
For outside of highways, you can still automate speed enforcement, but you also need to be designing roads that discourage speeding. Current ASHTO/MUDCD rules do the opposite, constantly pushing roads to have higher speeds in pursuit of better letter grades even though this represents a constant one-way ratchetting of road danger.
The purpose of road rules, including speed limits, needs to be SAFETY, not funding. Pretty much every municipality outside of the US that pursues vision zero programs does so primarily with engineering rather than enforcement, and when enforcement is used, camera-based enforcement is more effective and less likely to murder some random person of color.
All of that is true, but even with all of of that, any traffic violations would still be a routine traffic stop, because there’s always going to be people driving just a little bit outside the bounds of safety.
I disagree. Strongly.
Good road designs self-enforce safety.
There’s only a short list of things that ROUTINELY get people pulled over.
Speeding, which is better enforced by cameras than cops. Relying on human enforcement means people pull the lever on the gamble. Automated enforcement means you will get caught, and there’s no better deterrent to crime than that. And road design is STRONGLY correlated with prevailing speed. You can calm a road with better designs – if a road is rife with routine dangerous speeding, most likely it’s the engineer’s fault for putting in a racetrack instead of a street.
Running red lights. Same as above.
Vehicles out-of-spec. Expired tags, damaged tail lights, etc… A lot of this stuff should simply not result in a pull-over. Key in the plate then send the person notice and/or a fine in the mail.
Running stop signs/failing to yield to pedestrians. Not even that routine, but anywhere where this is a routine problem is SURELY an intersection that needs a redesign (e.g., roundabout treatment, traffic calming) to eliminate bad behavior.
DUI. This is deviant and unacceptable behavior. Cops should be enforcing this and people caught driving intoxicated should see their rights to operate motor vehicles RAPIDLY escaping them.
Using cell phones. Largely same as above.
And there’s one other routine traffic stop – the pretextual traffic stop, where the cops are just making the fuck up some bullshit reason to stop you in order to try and get you on some other crime / violate your civil rights.
There’s a litany of other common and bad driver behaviors that happen routinely. Failure to yield, merging on people, pulling out without looking, et cetera… but most of these do NOT generate traffic stops because no cop sees it happening and even if they do they don’t give a shit.