Traffic stops have problems. They’re used as a pretext to stop drivers for other reasons to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. They’re used for racial profiling. And then there’s always the potential in any police interaction that someone is going to end up dead, like Philando Castille. There is no question that problems exist and they’re real.
But did Berkeley come up with a viable solution?
After hours of emotional public testimony and a middle-of-the-night vote by Berkeley leaders, the progressive California city is moving forward with a novel proposal to replace police with unarmed civilians during traffic stops in a bid to curtail racial profiling.
Right wing twitter immediately saw this as revenge of the Karens, which is cute but silly. This isn’t about random Karen civvies pulling over other civvies, but creating a cadre of specialty traffic enforcement agents who are not sworn officers and unarmed, but whose job it is to pull over drivers and ticket them.
It seems as if it will have some impact on pretext stops, provided police are precluded from traffic enforcement. If police maintain authority to do a traffic stop, then pretext stops will continue as before, except with cops having more time to do them as their other traffic duties are off their backs. As for racial profiling, is there any reason to suspect the new corps will be any different than the old corps? It could be, but will it?
However, as with most Menckian ideas invented late at night in Berkeley. it’s got issues.
If an unarmed “civilian” replaces a cop in traffic stops, what possible reason would there be to comply?
He can’t do anything. He has no arrest authority or capability. Give him the finger and keep driving.
Some of us are so law-abiding that we would obey a command to pull over from pretty much anyone, but there are other folks for whom traffic laws are more “suggestions,” and their inclination might be to respond, “make me.” If you knew, with certainty, that there wasn’t a damn thing the traffic enforcing civilian could do to stop you, would you stop? Maybe, but others, of the sort who feels less obsequious, would not.
Since they’re not cops, they have no lawful authority to stop you. It’s no different than any random person “ordering” you to do anything. So you smile, or worse, and take off. When people figure this out, and they will because people are people and not these cartoon characters that are good, kind, loving and obedient, it’s going to be a problem. When they no longer fear a cop with a gun is sitting in an RMP waiting for them to blow through a red light,* even good people will take advantage of the opportunity.
The passionate response is that the civilians can take photos of the plate and there can be huge fines for disobedience. Let’s work that through.
Just as with red light cameras, pics don’t work. The car didn’t violate the law, the driver did, and photos of the plate don’t identify the driver. Then there’s the “huge fine,” creating the debtor’s prison problem that was prevalent in Ferguson. Fines have to be collected. How does that happen? Send out cops (because civilians demanding money will be no more effective than civilians ordering people to pull over without a bludgeon) to people’s homes to collect, because that doesn’t carry risk of arrest, search and seizure abuse and death, not to mention thousands of cops to go house to house to collect the government’s money.
But more importantly, the point of traffic enforcement isn’t to collect money (yes, but not theoretically), but to prevent death and injury on the road. Drunk drivers? Reckless drivers? Is the answer to send them a ticket three months later or to stop them, or at least provide a strong motive not to engage in dangerous activity, before they kill you and your family?
“I think what Berkeley is doing is nuts,” said Mark Cronin, a director with the Los Angeles Police Protective League, a union for officers. “I think it’s a big social experiment. I think it’s going to fail and it’s not going to take long for, unfortunately, traffic collisions, fatalities to increase exponentially.”
Cronin, a former traffic officer, said cities can’t rely on unattended traffic signals or camera lights to catch bad drivers and that people are needed to educate motorists on safe driving. But those people also need backup and the authority to arrest should they encounter a driver who is intoxicated, armed and fleeing a crime, or wanted on other charges.
Whether it will be as “exponentially” severe as predicted is speculative, but it won’t work anywhere near as well as hoped. There will be deaths, and there will be anarchy on the road because people are still people. If they do it now, with cops on the streets, they’re going to do it, and do it more, without cops. And then there’s the “unarmed” part.
“Traffic stops are one of the most unpredictable and therefore dangerous duties of law enforcement. There is no such thing as a routine traffic stop and to perform them effectively and safely takes months of police training in and outside of an academy,” said Frank Merenda, a former New York City Police Department captain who is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Marist College.
The danger comes from the unpredictable nature of stopping a random person. It’s not that every stop presents a danger, but that you never know which stop will, and some stops certainly will involve a dangerous person. The numbers of deaths, cops on one side and drivers on the other, fail to help understand the risks. How many incidents of violence don’t happen because the stop was performed by a cop with a gun. When it’s an unarmed civilian, the dynamic is very different.
Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University, called the idea an “overly simplistic plan that could have deadly consequences for unarmed traffic enforcement officers.”
The unduly passionate want to conclusively prove their ignorance of reality by glossing over obvious problems in search of simplistic solutions. “You just hate change,” they scream. “You just don’t care about the marginalized and oppressed,” they shout. But coming up with simplistic solutions that won’t work but have surface appeal to the clueless, doesn’t reflect concern for those who suffer from problems like pretext stops and racial profiling.
The alternative to bad isn’t necessarily good; it can always get worse. This is worse, even if its proponents lack the knowledge and experience to grasp why it’s such an ineffective idea at best, and dangerous idea at worst. But as Mencken admonished, “for every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple and wrong.”
*One of the knee-jerk reactions was that in some places, there are already non-police doing traffic enforcement alongside cops, so it can work. This misses the fact that a driver doesn’t know whether the flashing lights behind him are atop a squad car or a Karen car, so they comply for fear of the former. When it’s only the latter, their enlightened self-interest for obeying is gone. And don’t raise the comparison with parking enforcement, which is entirely different from traffic enforcement.
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Let me give this a more local flavor. I note with irony that drunk driving in Wisconsin seems like the state hobby, at times. And those times are generally between 10 pm and 4 am. Although on a football game day it could be 10 am and 4 pm. Having watched approximately 1,752 squad car videos of drunk driving stops, it is as clear as day that civilians attempting Traffic stops, in those hours and others, will come upon a possibly impaired driver. What then? Such traffic stops that become DUI stops will fare very poorly. The number of times I have seen a video in which a seasoned cop has de-escalated a drunk driver’s behavioral arc is very high. But once a traffic enforcement civilian sees possible impairment, things will often go south. High speed chases with a drunk driver? Drunk drivers veering off into the predawn light? Guaranteed. Yikes. (*I deny any financial interest here in seeing drunk drivers escape arrest.)
It would be far more useful if you didn’t “give this a more local flavor” and instead just addressed the subject of the post. Wisconsin is generally uninteresting to anyone outside of Wisconsin, and it frankly has nothing to do with the post, not to mention everyone has their own story and yours isn’t the most fascinating one in the world. K?
Maybe better stated this way, stripped of local color: the Berkeley solution seems to require the choice, at times, between doubling the needed manpower for traffic enforcement (civilian plus cop as you note) or letting the most dangerous traffic violators go when they have had enough civilian interaction. This may defund actual police budgetary dollars, however temporarily, or maybe not, since they would thereby need to be on call for every traffic stop. Yet their secondary police-level involvement also be rendered far less efficient and far more dangerous by dint of this built-in delay. So the Berkeley solution might be a way to generate some moderate enforcement and also some ticket revenue while using unarmed – what, inspectors? – but in no sense will it increase safety or make police more effective in nabbing the more dangerous criminally engaged traffic offenders.
Maybe.
And maybe just maybe it’s Scotch o’clock somewhere. If I had feelings, you would not have hurt them. But it is kind of cute to see both Miles and Guitardave come to my defense as your “victim.” I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party as victim. (And what’s wrong with being a curmudgeon?)
You may want to reread Miles and GD’s comments through a more sarcastic lens, pal.
Ignore Scott. You are so Milwaukee cool that I sit here all day hoping you’ll tell another anecdote to fill my empty years of legal practice.
The only thing that would make this thread better is if Kathryn Kase shows up to add one of her personal stories that’s a mere six degrees of separation from this post and involves some lawyer in Bumfuck NY nobody else gives a shit about who once said something both simultaneously obvious yet verbose. I guy can dream, right?
Don’t be such a curmudgeon. And Chris’ story remind me of when I was caught driving drunk in Saskatchewan in the summer of ’92. That’s what SJ is all about, right, a chance to tell our personal war stories because everybody wants to hear my stories because they are so cool?
I agree with everything you say, except the part about heavy fines for the owner of a car who speeds away. I think they will institute those, and, since they can fine you for parking violations, when there is no proof you were driving the car, why not do the same with moving violations? It does not feel fair to me, but the parking tickets never did either. I am not really seeing any clear dividing line between the two – in both cases, the car’s owner is financially responsible for everything the car does. Giving the driver of the car a ticket, or taking his license away- seems different, but big fines, directed at the car – in the sense that the registration of the car will not be renewed if the fines are not paid – if they do it for parking tickets, why not moving violations? . And probably, they will extend this so that, if ANY car you own has outstanding tickets, you can not register any other vehicle. Of course, if you choose to drive your unregistered car, in theory Berkeley can not stop you – the real cops can’t touch you, and you simply drive away from the traffic enforcement – but unless you drive only in Berkeley, you will get stopped by real cops somewhere else, and the car will be seized by them if enough tickets have piled up.
In that sense, it will be the perfect Berkeley solution — the City Council comes up with a solution which protects the class purportedly abused by the power structure, while ignoring the unintended consequences for third parties, the CHP and cops in nearby cities who will have to actually enforce the law) and the traditional rights of individuals (the right to not get a ticket for speeding if it is not proven you were driving the car) and, as long as the fines for not stopping are big enough, it will increase revenue for their many other social justice projects.
I posted this without reading it (write less and learn to use paragraph breaks) and hope it’s not as dumb as it could be. If so, I apologize for not trashing it.
Drivers in the course of alcohol, drugs or simple road rage stopping for the Karen car just so they can beat the shit out of an unarmed public employee? I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong.
“I won’t bite unless you want me to.”
…or if we reply with a personal story from Podunk.
Is that the WH press secretary? I didn’t know she could sing.
Does the route for the Cannonball Run goes through Berkeley?
Might be a way to cut some time off the record.
How about put a non-cop ( I’d say civilian, but as everyone but a cop knows, cops are civilians too) in every cop car. Uniform, but not a cop uniform. Cop pulls over the “criminal” non-cop gets out (no gun) issues ticket. If there are other problems, non-cop alerts cop. Cop murders whomever they feel should be murdered (conviction rate for cop murder negligible) and everyone is happy. I know, I know, we live in an imperfect world. Property seizure goes down, revenue goes down…..
That is twitter-level genius.
Some locales do have ride-alongs for various reasons. Would putting a monitor in the cars of the cops specifically assigned to traffic enforcement be a somewhat better option? Yes, it is not always a cop specifically assigned to traffic that pulls someone over but half a loaf is better than none. I am sure all the very smart people who know everything there is to know about critical race theory will be thrilled to volunteer.
There may be no perfect solution but imperfect, workable solutions may be the best we can hope for until the culture changes enough that they are not needed.
And reddit it is, LY. You forced my hand.
Smell the flowers once in a while esteemed one…. There are plenty of coffins out there already, looking for them around every corner isnt going to make you sleep any better.
This might be a moot point because of cultural differences, but, near as I can tell by googling from my vantage point in the US, officers in Britain who are tasked with traffic enforcement are not regularly armed – only about 1/20 carry a firearm. (I say Britain because in Northern Ireland cops generally *are* armed). I can’t find any stories or data suggesting that there is a traffic-stop-compliance problem over there.
I say possibly moot because the situation of being quite used to obeying unarmed police over there may not translate to a situation where a US municipality makes a sudden shift in who is doing traffic stops, but I think it is indicative that unarmed traffic enforcement could *theoretically* work.
Not moot so much as completely irrelevant to the US.
It’s not about whether the English set-up would ‘translate’. The general compliance over here is because our rank-and-file cops have never been armed, so lethal force has never been a part of the equation. Legal consequences for non compliance are suitably high so most folk obey, or at most argue querulously for a few minutes. Moreover, it’s illegal for the public to bear arms over here. Apart from the irrelevance of the UK approach to the blog post, our law enforcement is culturally very different, so we’re a useless comparator.
Job Requirements: Some Eukation, Ally LSMFT, Death Wish (Can be subsituted fir first two as required)
A big chunk of the people gravitating towards these types of jobs are going to be ones who aren’t psychologically well adjusted enough to be cops. Things are bad enough with the cops we got.
Will the HOA types flock to become traffic enforcers? Most people desperately want to let their inner scold out.