Let’s End Police Traffic Stops!

This week’s stupid idea award goes out to New York State Attorney General Letitia James who is calling for an end of police involvement in traffic enforcement.  This, of course, is in response to nationally publicized video of Daunte Wright, a black teenager,  being accidently shot by a white Minneapolis Police Officer on April 11 as he tried to drive away from a traffic stop.  For the galactically ignorant, this incident proves the narrative that white police officers use traffic stops to kill innocent black people.  Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald has this piece in today’s Wall Street Journal discussing why this idea wins the award.  Instead of having police make traffic stops, “the thinking goes, unarmed civilian traffic agents and speeding cameras should enforce the rules of the road.”  She notes that Oakland and Berkeley, CA, Lansing, Mich, and DC are already on board.   A 2000 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that “neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime.”   In Oakland, “nearly 60% of fatalities and serious injuries occur on only 6% of the city’s streets, overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods….Traffic deaths were up 22% in Oakland in 2020.  Most of the victims were black.”

MacDonald argues that Milwaukee has documented the inverse correlation between car stops and nonfatal shootings, robberies and car thefts.  When traffic enforcement declines, those crimes increase, said former Police Chief Edward Flynn.  It is a truism that “criminals are bad drivers.  They don’t follow traffic laws or update their vehicle registration.  Years ago I learned that expired inspection stickers were the quickest way to find a warrant fugitive.”  Progressives consider this knowledge racist, so let’s just ignore it.

Traffic stops are among the most dangerous incidents a police officer encounters.  It’s laughable to think that a traffic camera is going to stop a drunk habitual felon in a stolen car from running down pedestrians in a cross walk, as occurred in San Francisco last New Year’s Eve.  If the plan is to enforce traffic laws by putting unarmed traffic agents in high crime areas where most of the car crashes occur, how will they address the speeding drunk in the stolen car?  These are the kind of ideas that children come up with.

MacDonald also reports that stopping enforcement of shoplifting, passing fake currency, fare jumping and other crimes which are unfortunately most often committed by blacks are also being advanced by progressive District Attorneys and city leaders.  This, we are told, will enhance racial justice.