quote:

Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
See, where I disagree is that we should not spend our limited resources enforcing ticky tack laws.

If you're not going to enforce it, why is it a law?

quote:

We want to prohibit the stop completely, if it is based on profiling.

I completely agree. But how do we know? How do we know, in each instance, whether the officer even saw the color of the driver's skin before making the stop?

That's why I said above, maybe an annual statistical analysis of each officer's stops, to see if there's a racial disparity. (And I'm not sure that solves anything if there's no ticket issued and no record of the stop.)

I don't have an answer. I agree it's a problem. But ... what's the answer? If you tell cops not to enforce "no turn signal", then why have the law in the first place? Does it serve a public safety purpose? I think so.

And if cops can't use the "no turn signal" excuse for stops, won't they just come up with something else? The "you were veering all over the road" example you gave above is really never going to go out the window. That's an obvious hazard, and I would not want cops not to pull someone over for actual veering. At the same time, how do you know they didn't lie and claim to see veering? How much deviation is required before they can make a stop?

As I said, I don't have an answer.

Maybe force cops to make a record, including a picture, of every traffic stop? And then auditing that?

Again, I'm just trying to come up with ideas. It's a problem, and I don't have the right answer.

Cindy,

I am very sorry. I remember you telling us about the incident with LS. I do not recall that the response here was unanimously dismissive. I don't remember whether I posted on that thread at the time. I don't think I would have been dismissive then and I'm certainly not now.

I lived in McLean for a year when I was in college. I would see the police's actions then as biased, and I'm sure it's the same today.

Any way you slice it, it stinks.

Quirt,

I think I see the disconnect here:

Police agencies decide not to enforce certain laws all the time as a matter of policy. The law stays on the books (because of the legislative hurdles of getting the laws changed), but officers are told not to enforce it.

Equipment violations are an example. Poor people often drive old cars that have things wrong with them. Broken tail light is an example. Well, if you stop and ticket when you see these violations, you may be taking the $50 that helps the person not get evicted, touching off a spiral of economic consequences out of proportion to the offense.

Or you can say, "Our officers are enforcing the broken tail light law against black drivers of older cars a lot, but hardly ever against white drivers of older cars." Let's tell them to stop enforcing it against everyone, and in this way we can stop discriminating without studies, new cameras, and audits.

Failing to use a turn signal presents next to no public safety implications. Very low down on the list of things that can cause an accident. So why are we spending resources by having a cop pull someone over for it?

You have to understand how these things work in the real world. An officer sees a black guy driving down the road and decides to see if maybe this guy has drugs on him. He follows the guy for a few blocks until the guy turns, and then either sees that the guy failed to signal or just claims he saw it to speed things up.

He then approaches the vehicle, shining his light into the back seat. He gets the license and registration, and checks for warrants and probation status. If the guy is on probation, in some states the officer then has the right to search the vehicle. If not, the officer can ask a bunch of annoying questions about where the guy is going, does he have any weapons. He can say that he smells "the odor of marijuana" and say that he is going to call a drug sniffing dog (which will take a while), so why don't you let me just search the car so you can be on your way?

See how intrusive this can be for black people? It happens all the time with turn signal violations, failure to maintain lane, equipment violations, impeding traffic, and failure to dim brights.

One more thing. You have to understand the limits of body cameras and dash cameras. State troopers often have dash cameras because they pull so many people over. But dash cameras are an older technology, which is very limited in what it can pick up. And body cameras are usually attached to the chest, so all you see when the officer is in the car is the steering wheel.

All of which to say that the auditing function you propose isn't practical because the footage of the turn signal infraction isn't visible anyway.

Anyway, those are the arguments some people make for taking away officer discretion for minor infractions officers have been disproportionately using against people of color.

Is it worth enforcing a turn signal law for no reason other than that it is on the books?

I lied, one more thing again.

I should mention that you don't have to forbid officers from pulling people over for failing to signal. You can instead change the department's internal processes.

In other words, you can make it so that the station commander has to review and sign off on all turn signal violations. No one is going to want to go before his commander and explain why he is writing ticky tack tickets and get chewed out for wasting everyone's time, so officers will stop doing it. Done and done.

Cindy, I remember when you posted about your son. I don’t know what my reaction was at the time, though I know what I hope it was, but I definitely wouldn’t dismiss it now. I’m sorry people dismissed it then. Also I’m glad you have stuck around even though you haven’t always felt supported here.

As to the police issue, I wonder if data collection is, as Quirt mentioned, part of the answer. Every time a police officer engages with a person, they have to record race data. It wouldn’t take long to see patterns emerge. At the very least, it may force cops to face their implicit biases.

quote:

Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
I lied, one more thing again.

I should mention that you don't have to forbid officers from pulling people over for failing to signal. You can instead change the department's internal processes.

In other words, you can make it so that the station commander has to review and sign off on all turn signal violations. No one is going to want to go before his commander and explain why he is writing ticky tack tickets and get chewed out for wasting everyone's time, so officers will stop doing it. Done and done.

I don’t have a problem with that idea.

I do take issue with the idea that there is no function to the turn signal. It lets other drivers know what your intentions are. If there are following, it lets them know you’re probably going to slow down. It has a safety purpose. And, even if you’re the only car on the road, it needs to be a habit. My own kids, after they took drivers ed, started to call me out the few times I forgot to use a turn signal.

Is it worth wasting time pulling someone over for it? Separate question. But I do think it serves a purpose.

I also think your point about technology could be solved by better technology, which is available. Yes, that costs money, but so does all the militarized equipment they buy. Stop buying so much of that, buy better cameras. And make all the footage publicly available, if there’s a complaint filed.

I want racial bias eliminated from policing. Maybe some sunlight would help.

But a big part of the defund police movement (gad I hate that name) is the lack of proportionality to these things. You have a policeman pulling someone over for a burned-out tail light who is fully armed and ready to head to a gunfight. Traffic stops are inherently dangerous, but part of their danger is due to the police being armed.

Bear me out. Hypothetically, let's say that there exists an unarmed (or minimally armed, say taser alone) police force whose main job is to deal with traffic violations and disturbing the peace - parking, burned out tail lights, no signal, speeding, even suspected DWI/DUI, drunken yelling and/or mental illness. If the person in the car or being stopped and questioned knows he's going to be ticketed or arrested but not shot, the situation is already less fraught. If the cop knows he doesn't have the quick fallback of drawing his weapon, s/he won't be so aggressive when interacting with the driver.

Extend this to non-traffic violations like disturbing the peace, public drunkenness, mental illness. Add in a bit of training. I think this is potentially a better way forward.

Further (waiting for heads to explode) why do we have police pulling over people for speeding anyway? The only time I ever got a speeding ticket was from a camera. It worked--I was speeding, I was clearly visible in the photo, I paid my fine (via internet) and moved on with my life--lesson learned.

Yes, there are the "but what about the truly dangerous guy...," and they certainly exist. However, they don't exist, I don't think, at nearly the rate that warrants fully armed police pulling over every traffic violator or drunk dude yelling and screaming as he walks down the street. So occasionally a bad guy gets away, but a much larger number of people aren't threatened, aren't living in fear of random escalation, racial profiling that could turn deadly.

I think it's definitely worth a thought.

Data collection is . . . fraught.

Yes, it is important. But it is difficult to get data collection to take you all the way to the point where you are changing a police department where black people are being stopped and searched disproportionately due to explicit or implicit bias of officers.

Say you have officer Jones, who has discretion to make traffic stops. Officer Jones will have all kinds of biases: He may be more likely to stop young, beautiful women so he can have a look. He might be more likely to let young, beautiful women go because he likes giving them a break. He might be more likely to pull over black men in hopes they will turn out to be drug dealers and he can get a promotion.

Say you collect Officer Jones' data on the 10 traffic stops he made for a particular month, and you see he is stopping more women drivers and letting them go than male drivers. And he is stopping more black male drivers than white drivers for minor offenses, like turn signal.

What do you do with that information?

Are you really going to discipline him? Are you sure your sample of 10 is big enough to draw conclusions? And what are you comparing him to as you try to discern whether the pattern you have picked up doesn't have a benign explanation?

I'm saying it is harder than collecting data. And all the data in the world does you no good unless you can do something with it, right?

The theory I have been explaining is more straightforward. Once you know an agency, on the whole, has been using its discretion to racially profile, it is a reasonable response to take away that discretion. After all, if your teenager is given discretion about how to drive the family car and abuses that discretion, you don't "collect data." You take away the discretion, meaning the car.

Given that we know many officers exercise their discretion for certain types of stops (e.g. turn signal violations) in a racially discriminatory manner based on profiling, perhaps one could conclude they have lost their "turn signal" privileges. Is there an impact on public safety? Meh, it's negligible -- how much injury and loss of life is attributable to failure to signal a turn? But how much injury and loss of life is happening because armed officers make stops for ticky tack reasons while secretly hoping the driver could be a dangerous criminal, thereby increasing the chance of a fatal encounter?

quote:

Originally posted by Nina:

Bear me out. Hypothetically, let's say that there exists an unarmed (or minimally armed, say taser alone) police force whose main job is to deal with traffic violations and disturbing the peace - parking, burned out tail lights, no signal, speeding, even suspected DWI/DUI, drunken yelling and/or mental illness. If the person in the car or being stopped and questioned knows he's going to be ticketed or arrested but not shot, the situation is already less fraught. If the cop knows he doesn't have the quick fallback of drawing his weapon, s/he won't be so aggressive when interacting with the driver.

Some of those things are best handled by an unarmed person. Parking patrol doesn't require a gun. Many of the other things do, though.

The problem is that there are some people out there who, when drunk or impaired or pissed off, can kill you with their bare hands (or who have a gun or other weapon). This is especially so if you are a female officer, are older, are out of shape, or are just not so good at fighting. So if I were a police officer, I would insist on having a gun for self-defense. I mean, if I pull over some 250 pound guy and walk up to his door, what am I going to do if he gets out and informs me that he is going to kick my ass? Let's not even talk about Tasers, because they often do not work for a variety of reasons. Then what?

I think the issue is who gets dispatched to a call. At the dispatch stage, there need to be options other than always dispatching two officers who don't bring anything to the table except firearms and tasers. We need *way* more crisis intervention teams of officers and social workers who have been specially trained for how to do deal with impairment and mental illness.

There is an interesting Netflix documentary about two crisis intervention officers in Austin. They go around doing nothing but responding to calls for suicidal people, impaired people, etc. They wear plain clothes instead of uniforms because the uniform is very threatening to someone in a mental health crisis. It's a really good documentary, if you're interested.

Also, to understand why police officers doing even the most routine things may need a gun, check out this 4-minute video. You can stop watching after the second officer arrives. Don't worry, it is not gory and nobody dies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1BTzPyi9nk

Good points about data collection, Cindy. Maybe it’s not the solution, but I do think it has a place. If only to move the “we don’t have a problem” issue. But your point about turn signal violations is taken, as well. I’d wager the proportion of turn signal violations pull-overs that are actually about the turn signal is way less than 1%, whether they’d admit it or not.

quote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1BTzPyi9nk

My goodness.

This is an excellent example of how complicated policing is.

It’s also an excellent example of someone (the officer) staying calm and not escalating. OTOH Probably if he had been a teeny bit more aggressive, it might have ended differently. Ugh.

This is why I could never be cop. I’m exhausted just watching that.

quote:

Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
Data collection is . . . fraught.

Yes, it is important. But it is difficult to get data collection to take you all the way to the point where you are changing a police department where black people are being stopped and searched disproportionately due to explicit or implicit bias of officers.

Say you have officer Jones, who has discretion to make traffic stops. Officer Jones will have all kinds of biases: He may be more likely to stop young, beautiful women so he can have a look. He might be more likely to let young, beautiful women go because he likes giving them a break. He might be more likely to pull over black men in hopes they will turn out to be drug dealers and he can get a promotion.

Say you collect Officer Jones' data on the 10 traffic stops he made for a particular month, and you see he is stopping more women drivers and letting them go than male drivers. And he is stopping more black male drivers than white drivers for minor offenses, like turn signal.

What do you do with that information?

Are you really going to discipline him? Are you sure your sample of 10 is big enough to draw conclusions? And what are you comparing him to as you try to discern whether the pattern you have picked up doesn't have a benign explanation?

I'm saying it is harder than collecting data. And all the data in the world does you no good unless you can do something with it, right?

The theory I have been explaining is more straightforward. Once you know an agency, on the whole, has been using its discretion to racially profile, it is a reasonable response to take away that discretion. After all, if your teenager is given discretion about how to drive the family car and abuses that discretion, you don't "collect data." You take away the discretion, meaning the car.

Given that we know many officers exercise their discretion for certain types of stops (e.g. turn signal violations) in a racially discriminatory manner based on profiling, perhaps one could conclude they have lost their "turn signal" privileges. Is there an impact on public safety? Meh, it's negligible -- how much injury and loss of life is attributable to failure to signal a turn? But how much injury and loss of life is happening because armed officers make stops for ticky tack reasons while secretly hoping the driver could be a dangerous criminal, thereby increasing the chance of a fatal encounter?

As to your final question, it's a balance of costs and benefits. You clearly strike that balance differently.

As to what you'd do with that data, initially, the following: "Officer Jones, we notice that your traffic stops [side note: 10 a month? Less than one per working day? That alone may be problematic, depending on what other reports he files] show a pattern of stopping women more than men, and black people more than white people. Officer, let's hope that's a statistical anomaly. We would not want to see that pattern continue over time, or else we will have to consider whether it demonstrates a pattern of bias, in which case it will rise to the level of a disciplinary action. Oh, and officer, it seems that you have your hand on your weapon more frequently than is average among traffic stops by your fellow officers. Do you need additional training on the appropriate way to conduct traffic stops, or shall we consider this an anomaly too?"

Officer Jones: "OK, this is BS. In case you haven't noticed, my beat is in a diverse neighborhood, and I make a lot of my stops near a school. The school has a lot of parents and babysitters picking up kids from school, and I enforce the traffic laws often for safety reasons. So yes, I stop more women than men because that's who is driving on my beat, I stop more black people than white because that's who lives there, and I give a lot of warnings if they seem like they have learned their lesson.

And what is this nonsense about me putting my hand on my weapon? Prove it. Where is the footage? If my hand is near my weapon, I don't see the problem because I have never once pulled my gun out in a traffic stop. Is there anything in policy prohibiting me from touching my weapon? No? Didn't think so.

"And now you're coming in here suggesting I'm a racist? Look. I pull people over because they're not driving safely, period. Tell you what. I won't pull anyone over at all next month; will that solve your problem, Sergeant? Then you can't come in here and call me a racist because I will have treated everyone exactly the same."

"Officer, if you make zero traffic stops, and if an audit of your dashcam shows that you've ignored clear violations of law, perhaps it'll be time for you to look for another line of work."