Traffic Without Police: A New Legal Framework

Matt McGowan: Welcome to Short Talks From the Hill, a research podcast of the University of Arkansas. My name is Matt McGowan. I’m a science writer here at the university.

Traffic stops are the most frequent interaction between police and civilians. Research has shown that Black and Latinx motorists are disproportionately stopped by police for traffic violations. Compared to white motorists, these minority groups are also disproportionately questioned, frisked, searched, cited, and arrested during traffic stops. Many of these stops are considered pretextual, meaning they enable officers to initiate contact with motorists and to then search for evidence of non-traffic crime without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. This targeting of Black and Latinx motorists has sometimes led to police mistreatment and abuse.

University of Arkansas Law professor Jordan Blair Woods has been studying this problem. In “Traffic Without Police,” published recently in Stanford Law Review, Blair Woods articulates a new legal framework for traffic enforcement. His proposal suggests separating traffic enforcement from critical police functions, such as responding to emergencies and conducting criminal investigations.

Welcome, Jordan, thanks for being here.

Jordan Blair Woods: Great, thank you so much for having me.

MM: Absolutely. So, as a way to get us into this problem, into this topic, to illustrate the problem, can you tell us who was Sandra Bland and what happened to her?

JBW: Sure. So Sandra Bland was involved in a high-profile traffic stop, and the video of the stop, which became public, it really shows how quickly a routine traffic stop can escalate into unnecessary violence against drivers and especially people of color. So Bland, she’s a 28-year-old Black woman who was pulled over on July 10th, 2015, in the middle of the day, by a male Texas state trooper for a failure to signal violation. And the trooper went to Bland’s window after stopping her, asked for her driver’s license and registration, walked back to his patrol car with the documents and then several minutes later went back up to Bland’s window, and it seemed that he intended… that he was only going to give Bland a warning. But the trooper sensed that Bland was irritated. He asked if she was okay, and Bland responded that she was unhappy about being pulled over. And after Bland explained why she was upset, the trooper basically asked, are you done, and then he requested her to put out her cigarette. And Bland responded that it’s my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette? And the trooper became more and more irritated, ordered Bland out of the car. She said she didn’t have to get out. Essentially, the trooper then opened the driver’s door, tried to pull her from the car. And Bland was very clear that she didn’t want to talk to the officer, other than to identify herself for the purposes of the traffic ticket. But the trooper continued to grab Bland. She was screaming don’t touch me, I’m not under arrest. And then the trooper yelled that she was under arrest and Bland, you know, of course, is confused and asked what four, and the trooper, who continued to order her out of the car and ultimately yelled, yeah, I’m going to light you up while pointing a taser at her. And Bland asked, you’re doing all this for failure to signal? And eventually Bland got out of the car and the trooper put Bland’s hands behind her back, handcuffed her, pinned her head on the ground, and told her that she was being arrested for resisting arrest. And the trooper told Bland that initially he was going to give her a warning, but was now going to throw her in jail. And three days later, Bland was found hanging from a plastic bag in her jail cell in an apparent suicide. So the case, the facts really illustrate the ways in which we see traffic stops for minor traffic violations like failure to signal just quickly escalating into violence. That’s completely unnecessary and unjustified.

MM: So, let’s talk about your study and what you are proposing as a solution. How do we remove police from traffic enforcement and, I guess, equally important, in lieu of them, who would enforce traffic laws?

JBW: Sure, so the goal of my research is really to bring the traffic stop back to what I think it should be about, which is transportation safety and traffic safety. And we’re in a position today that for decades the traffic stop has been used by law-enforcement agencies as a tool for criminal investigation, and it’s not a very good one. And so what my framework does is it would replace in-person traffic stops that are conducted with by police officers, in particular armed police officers, with new traffic agencies that operate independently of the police that hire their own staff to conduct traffic stops instead. So under this new framework, who I call traffic monitors, these new employees, they would be the ones in charge of conducting a routine traffic enforcement or basic traffic violations. And what’s important about them is that they wouldn’t have traditional police powers to search or arrest or detain. The traffic stop would essentially start with the traffic violation and end with either the warning or the citation, and the driver would go on their way.

MM: And this is not an original idea, is that right? There are examples of this form of traffic enforcement in practice. Municipalities are experimenting with the approach. What are these cities or municipalities, communities and do you… Can you say something about how this practice is working there?

JBW: Yeah, so probably the clearest example and the most pressing example now is the city of Berkeley, which in July 2020 passed a comprehensive resolution that would basically create a department of transportation and hire their own teams, similar to what my proposal recommends, to conduct basic traffic enforcement. And right now they’re looking at how implementation would be rolled out. They’re looking at what might some of the legal obstacles might be, and in other jurisdictions… really in the United States were at the beginning of experimenting with these different approaches to traffic enforcement. I think it’s important to know is that internationally, there are some interesting and useful examples that show how this system could work. And I think New Zealand is probably the clearest example where between the 1930s and the 1990s, so for over 6 decades, they actually had a separate national ministry of transport, and the department and the staff under that department were the ones that handled traffic stops and basic traffic stops for minor traffic violations, not the police. And you know that system ended with some rollbacks in the public infrastructure that happened with new government that took effect in the 1990s. What it shows is that there’s another way that it’s at least possible to separate routine traffic stops from the routine police work that law enforcement officers conduct.

MM: We’ve seen… so many of us have seen these kind of dramatic dash-cam videos from patrol cars, and they’re really… they just set me on edge immediately. Just the framing and the, I don’t know, the lighting, and you just know that something bad is going to happen. So I don’t know if that’s where we get this impression, but we have this perception that traffic stops are especially dangerous, dangerous for police. And I know in some cases they are. How dangerous are traffic stops for police and would these traffic monitors find themselves in situations that they can’t handle?

JBW: Right? And so you know it’s important to, I guess, first start with what the myth is versus the reality from empirical research is. We think both do important work and are important, so the idea that routine traffic stops are just fraught and especially dangerous settings for police officers is an idea that goes back decades, and it infiltrates law enforcement culture and shapes how police officers are trained. So usually police academies will show at least one video of, let’s say an officer that’s conducting a routine traffic stop and you know it looks routine. And then as the officer is approaching, they get randomly shot in the face. And the idea of using these videos is to press home the point that it really… There’s no such thing as a routine traffic stop, that any routine encounter can become quickly deadly for police officers if they hesitate on the scene or they refrain from using force. And when your starting point when you’re training as an officer is watching these videos, and really hearing these danger narratives, you can only expect that it’s going to affect how officers think about traffic stops and how they conduct themselves when they’re handling these types of police encounters. But in my prior research, what I’ve showed is that these danger narratives really don’t map onto the empirical reality. We have to remember that tens of millions of traffic stops occur every year. And what I showed through a prior study that I published in the Michigan Law Review is that if we look at the incidents of violence that’s occurring, really the rate of a felonious killing of an officer during routine traffic stop is only one in every 6.5 million stops, and the rate for an assault resulting in serious injury to an officer is only one in every 361,000 stops. Most of the violence that we see occurring in traffic stops is relatively rare against officers. It’s typically low risk, and it doesn’t involve weapons. Now, one of the important things that I discovered in that research is that when we actually look to the types of violence that officers are experiencing, it’s actually not random. It is usually connected to the ways in which officers are invoking their authority during traffic stops that’s beyond the basic asking for a driver’s license or driver’s license or registration, the basic documents that come along with the traffic stop. And it’s things like ordering people out of cars, telling them that they’re under arrest, yelling at drivers, those are the types of things that are enabling the types of escalation that compromise both officer and civilian safety during traffic stops. So with traffic monitors, how does this change? So one of the key things is that, again, traffic monitors aren’t going to be authorized to conduct the types of searches and arrests and invocations of police authority that are at least triggering many cases of escalation and violence that we’re seeing during traffic stops. Now, I think that as a matter of course, every traffic monitor should of course be trained in de-escalation tactics, should be trained in self-defense and perhaps in serious cases where there really is an assault against them, then you can get law-enforcement involved. But the overwhelming majority, right now, of situations that escalate into violence against officers, it’s really low, and my hope is that it would be even lower when the stakes of a traffic stop are just about a traffic ticket or traffic warning and not all this other stuff involving criminal investigation and potential arrests that might occur from a simple traffic stop.

MM: Jordan, thank you for your time. Thank you so much for being with us here on Short Talks From the Hill.

JBW: Great, thank you for having me.

MM: Music for Short Talks From the Hill was written and performed by local musician Ben Harris. For more information and additional podcasts, visit Arkansas Research. That’s arkansasresearch.uark.edu, the home of science and research news at the University of Arkansas.