Are you good with some car blowing through a stop sign? There’s a reason for the sign. There’s a reason why it’s a stop sign, not a “have a nice day” sign. Most of us would strongly prefer that drivers stop, because we rely on general adherence to traffic control signs to remain alive. It’s not so much about being compliant as about the necessity for certain rules to avoid certain death.

So what the hell are they thinking in Oakland?

Oakland police, long criticized for using traffic violations to search and interrogate people of color, are trying something new: They’ve dramatically cut back on enforcement.

Officers are declining to pull people over in most cases for low-level infractions like a broken windshield or taillight. They might not even stop motorists for rolling through a stop sign, if no one is crossing the street and the car doesn’t pose an imminent threat to public safety, said police Capt. Christopher Bolton.

There is a point that gets conflated regularly by almost all passionate people who care about racial discrimination and profiling. I, too, am vehemently against police profiling drivers based on race, and do not, for a moment, doubt that it is deeply embedded in the psyche of a great many cops who believe that black and brown drivers are more likely to be criminalish, and thus stop them based on any, or no, traffic justification which might lead to evidence of a more serious offense. Or at least, a money seizure for the department’s next Christmas party.

But as I’ve also argued, there is law and there is racism, and the two are parallel, not intertwined.

Perhaps the gravest failing with empiricism is the error of conflating correlation with causation. The current trend is to explain the phenomenon of blatant disparate treatment as “systemic racism,” a fine phrase but for the fact that it’s so vague and imprecise that it offers little of use in figuring out what to fix and how to fix it. As Radley notes, it’s not as if the system works fine for anyone, but that it works worse for people of color.

If too many black people are being stopped, giving rise to a claim of disparate impact of police traffic enforcement, there are two obvious ways to deal with the problem. Stop enforcing traffic regulations or stop engaging in racist profiling. In Oakland, they’ve chosen the former, and are rewarded by people with letters after their names telling them how smart they are.

“They’re becoming more sophisticated,” said Jennifer Eberhardt, a psychology professor at Stanford University who has worked with Oakland Police for years to curb racial bias and mend a corrosive relationship with residents.

This has become a fairly common analysis by academics, that when someone does what they want them to do, they lavish them with the praise of the elite. Why is it “sophisticated”? Because they’ve acknowledged and embraced the theory she prefers?

During 2018, the first full year of the program, the number of “discretionary” stops — the ones initiated by an officer, not a call for service — dropped precipitously: from 31,528 in 2017 to 19,900 last year. The racial disparity changed only marginally, with African Americans making up 61% of motorists stopped in 2017 and 55% in 2018. White people, by contrast, accounted for 9% of stops last year and 11% this year.

What these numbers mean can’t be discerned from this superficial recitation. Were they conducting far too many stops before, manufacturing excuses to pull over black drivers when they felt like it? Are they letting dangerous conduct go unaddressed now, as they seem to suggest is happening? As it turns out, black drivers are still stopped in gross disproportionate percentages, but just in lower gross numbers.

Here’s the thing: it’s a very different issue if a cop pulls over a driver, any driver, to let him know his brake light is out, then wishes him well and drives away than if the brake light stop is an excuse to conduct an auto search, a frisk and a warrant check.

Police Chief Anne Kirkpatrick touts the approach as innovative and forward-thinking. She knows of no other department in the nation that is deliberately reducing traffic stops, and Eberhardt said the same.

If there is no law or safety justification for a stop, then don’t do it. Cops shouldn’t do it. It would be unconstitutional for them to do it. But if there is a legitimate reason to do it, then the failure to address traffic violations endangers others. It’s great that the Oakland police chief is concerned about her cops not being as racist as they wanna be, but what of the people who want to make it home for dinner alive?

And is this unenforcement mending the rending of race relations in Oakland?

The findings didn’t surprise 45-year-old John Jones III, who said he has been pulled over so many times that he no longer drives in Oakland. Jones said he ditched his last car after a particularly traumatic stop in 2015, when several officers approached his vehicle with guns drawn. Now he gets around by hailing rides from Lyft.

“They’ve been trying to do this spin that fewer black people are being stopped … and I’m not buying it,” Jones said. He suspects that racial bias is so deeply embedded in police work, that an agency can’t expect to solve the problem just by stopping fewer people.

Years of racist policing in Oakland can’t be undone by unenforcement. Nobody gets home and says, “Wow, I drove my car today and didn’t get pulled over. What great cops Oakland has!” It’s the sort of thing only an statistician or academic could believe would work to make people feel as if their cops aren’t as racist as they were before.

There are a great many stops that occur and escalate needlessly as a direct by-product of police racial prejudice. There is a very real problem of pervasive racism within the ranks of police. The solution, however, is not to engage in unenforcement of traffic laws that exist for good reason, but to address the racism.

There are two separate problems. Pretending otherwise is simplistic and very fashionable, but fails to fix either. Conflating the two just makes the roads less safe, and they’re just as less safe for black people as anyone else.