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We are at a watershed moment in which growing national protest and public outcry over police injustice and brutality, especially against people of color, are animating new meanings of public safety and new proposals for structural police reforms. Traffic stops are the most frequent interaction between police and civilians today, and they are a persistent source of racial and economic injustice. Black and Latinx motorists in particular are disproportionately stopped, questioned, frisked, searched, cited, and arrested during traffic stops. Traffic enforcement is thus a common gateway for funneling overpoliced and marginalized communities into the criminal-justice system. Piecemeal constitutional and statutory interventions are insufficient to address these systemic problems, which necessitate structural police reform and require a fundamental rethinking of the role of police in the traffic space. Traffic enforcement and policing are so intertwined today, however, that it is difficult to envision a world without police involvement in traffic regulation. Illustrating this point is one of the common critiques lodged against the growing movement to defund the police: \"Who would enforce traffic laws?\" This Article offers a normative vision of our driving system that challenges the conventional wisdom that traffic enforcement is impossible without the police. It articulates a new legal framework that decouples traffic enforcement from police functions. This framework offers a starting point for renewed thinking about the basic structure of traffic enforcement, the role of police in traffic enforcement, and the ways in which law and policy can be used as tools to achieve fairness and equality in traffic enforcement. The Article provides a comprehensive analysis of the important benefits that nonpolice alternatives to traffic enforcement would create for public safety, policing, and criminal-law and criminal-justice reform, especially for people of color and other marginalized communities who are vulnerable to overpolicing and overcriminalization in today's driving regime. The Article concludes by addressing potential objections to removing the police from traffic enforcement.

The purpose of the present study is to investigate mental well-being among youth after witnessing police stops. A national, urban-born sample of youth in the USA from the most recent wave (2014–2017) of the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) was employed, with a focus on youth who had not been directly stopped by police (N = 2506). We used t-tests and multivariable ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to estimate direct associations, product-term analysis to test for effect modification by gender and race/ethnicity, and the Karlson-Holm-Breen (KHB) method to assess for mediation by experiences of emotional distress during a stop. Findings indicate that youth who have witnessed police stops report significantly higher levels of depression (t = 5.93, p < 0.01) and anxiety (t = 6.57, p < 0.01) and lower levels of happiness (t =  − 4.02, p < 0.01) following the stop than those who have not. Among youth witnessing stops (N = 1488), more intrusive witnessed encounters correspond to diminished mental well-being across indicators, in part due to elevated emotional distress during witnessed stops. Findings hold regardless of gender, yet vary somewhat by race and ethnicity, with youth of color reporting less anxiety than their White counterparts after witnessing an intrusive stop, but reporting greater reductions in happiness. Collectively, our findings suggest that witnessing police stops may contribute to inequities in youth mental well-being. A public health approach that combines prevention and treatment strategies may mitigate the harms of police exposure and reduce disparities in youth well-being.

Recent studies by police departments and researchers confirm that police stop persons of racial and ethnic minority groups more often than whites relative to their proportions in the population. However, it has been argued that stop rates more accurately reflect rates of crimes committed by each ethnic group, or that stop rates reflect elevated rates in specific social areas, such as neighborhoods or precincts. Most of the research on stop rates and police-citizen interactions has focused on traffic stops, and analyses of pedestrian stops are rare. In this article we analyze data from 125,000 pedestrian stops by the New York Police Department over a 15-month period. We disaggregate stops by police precinct and compare stop rates by racial and ethnic group, controlling for previous race-specific arrest rates. We use hierarchical multilevel models to adjust for precinct-level variability, thus directly addressing the question of geographic heterogeneity that arises in the analysis of pedestrian stops. We find that persons of African and Hispanic descent were stopped more frequently than whites, even after controlling for precinct variability and race-specific estimates of crime participation.

This Article presents findings from the largest and most comprehensive study to date on violence against the police during traffic stops. Every year, police officers conduct tens of millions of traffic stops. Many of these stops are entirely unremarkable—so much so that they may he fairly described as routine. Nonetheless, the narrative that routine traffic stops are fraught with grave and unpredictable danger to the police permeates police training and animates Fourth Amendment doctrine. This Article challenges this dominant danger narrative and its centrality within key institutions that regulate the police. The presented study is the first to offer an estimate for the danger rates of routine traffic stops to law enforcement officers. I reviewed a comprehensive dataset of thousands of traffic stops that resulted in violence against officers across more than 200 law enforcement agencies in Florida over a 10-year period. The findings reveal that violence against officers was rare and that incidents that do involve violence are typically low risk and do not involve weapons. Under a conservative estimate, the rate for a felonious killing of an officer during a routine traffic stop was only 1 in every 6.5 million stops, the rate for an assault resulting in serious injury to an officer was only 1 in every 361,111 stops, and the rate for an assault against officers (whether it results in injury or not) was only 1 in every 6,959 stops. This Article is also the first to offer a comprehensive typology of violence against the police during traffic stops. The typology indicates that a narrow set of observable contextual factors precedes most of this violence—most commonly, signs of flight or intoxication. The typology further reveals important qualitative differences regarding violence during traffic stops initiated for only traffic enforcement versus criminal enforcement. The study has significant implications for law enforcement agencies and courts. The findings and typology have the potential to inform police training and prompt questions about whether greater invocation of police authority during routine stops for traffic violations undermines, rather than advances, both officer and civilian safety. The findings also lay an early empirical foundation for rethinking fundamental assumptions about officer safety and routine traffic stops in Fourth Amendment doctrine. This Article ultimately urges institutional actors that regulate the police to abandon oversimplified danger narratives surrounding routine traffic stops in favor of context-rich archetypes that more accurately reflect the risk and costs of policing during these stops.

This Article empirically illustrates that legal doctrines permitting police officers to engage in pretextual traffic stops may contribute to an increase in racial profiling. In 1996, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 'Whren v. United States' that pretextual traffic stops do not violate the Fourth Amendment. As long as police officers identify an objective violation of a traffic law, they may lawfully stop a motorist-even if their actual intention is to use the stop to investigate a hunch that by itself does not amount to probable cause or reasonable suspicion. Scholars and civil rights activists have sharply criticized 'Whren', arguing that it gives police officers permission to engage in racial profiling. But social scientists have struggled to empirically evaluate how 'Whren' has influenced police behavior. A series of court decisions in the State of Washington presents an opportunity to test the effects of pretextual-stop doctrines on police behavior. In the years since the 'Whren' decision, Washington has experimented with multiple rules that provide differing levels of protection against pretextual stops. In 1999, the Washington Supreme Court held in 'State v. Ladson' that the state constitution barred police from conducting pretextual traffic stops. However, in 2012, the court eased this restriction on pretextual stops in 'State v. Arreola'.

Objectives Test the effects of a recent police stop and a recent police stop at gunpoint on changes in attitudes towards the police among residents of Brazil’s biggest city. Methods A three-wave longitudinal survey of São Paulo residents (2015–2019) measured people’s beliefs about police legitimacy, expectations of police procedural fairness, effectiveness, and overpolicing, whether they were recently stopped by the police, and whether officers had pointed a gun at them during that stop. A novel causal estimand focused on the effect of change in treatment status is estimated using matching methods for panel data combined with difference-in-differences. Results While estimates are too imprecise to suggest an effect of a recent police stop on attitudinal change, recent police stops at gunpoint decrease public expectations of procedural fairness, increase expectations of overpolicing, and harm public beliefs of police legitimacy. Conclusions Under a credible conditional parallel trends assumption, this study provides causal evidence on the relationship between aggressive policing practices and legal attitudes, with implications to public recognition of legal authority in a major Global South city.

This article connects the administrative state and the criminal system - two dominant modes of governance that too often are discussed in isolation. It presents an original account of how the policies and the failures of federal administrative agencies drive criminal law enforcement at the local level. In doing so, this article exposes a significant driver of criminal policy and possible interventions to correct some of its failures. The primary vehicle for this analysis is an in-depth case study of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) - the federal agency best known for crash test dummies and five-star ratings as part of its traffic-safety mission - and its support for pretextual traffic stops. This article unearths a series of NHTSA programs that have, for decades, trained state and local police to use traffic stops to ferret out drug traffickers, violent criminals, and even terrorists. NHTSA's embrace of a policing mindset has become an unexpected enabler of pretextual stops, one that has pulled agency resources away from systemic regulation of the auto industry. The impact of NHTSA's quiet campaign has been significant, engraining its view of traffic stops within policing agencies across the country without public visibility or oversight. These revelations come at a critical moment for a nation struggling with twin crises of traffic safety and policing. Learning from NHTSA and moving to the broader administrative state, this article draws on a diverse set of agencies to identify a pattern of non-law enforcement agencies shirking their systemic regulatory duties in favor of individual criminal law enforcement. The result is that parts of the administrative state have become systemic drivers of over-policing and criminalization in ways that have, until now, received virtually no attention.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how suspicion that leads to a police stop is developed by police officers in Belgium, and the way in which police department culture influences the creation of suspicion.Design/methodology/approachThe data on which this article is based are the result of an ethnographic study within two local Belgian police forces. In total, the researcher has observed for a total amount of 750 h the day-to-day practices of police officers in different police services. Next to that, 37 in-depth interviews were taken from police officers employed in the same services that participated in the observations.FindingsWhile the creation of suspicion in a police officer's mind is a complex process that is influenced by various factors such as the individual characteristics of the police officer and the applicable legislation, the impact of police department culture is equally important and can be responsible for maintaining discriminatory and stereotypical mindsets.Originality/valueThe originality of this paper lies in the fact that it offers insight into the Belgian police stop practice, a topic about which not much is known on an international level. In addition, it also focuses on the role of departmental cultures in the actions of police officers.

Under the Stop, Question, and Frisk (SQF) policy, New York City (NYC) police stopped Black Americans at more than twice the rate of non-Hispanic whites, after controlling for arrests and precinct differences. We examined whether police stops of Black Americans during SQF correspond positively with psychiatric emergency department (ED) visits among Black residents in NYC. We utilized as the exposure all police stops, stops including frisking, and stops including use of force among Black Americans in NYC between 2006 and 2015 from the New York City Police Department’s New York City—Stop, Question, and Frisk database. We examined 938,356 outpatient psychiatric ED visits among Black Americans in NYC between 2006 and 2015 from the Statewide Emergency Department Database (SEDD). We applied Box-Jenkins time-series methods to control for monthly temporal patterns. Results indicate that all stops, frisking, and use of force of Black residents correspond with increased psychiatric ED visits among Black Americans in NYC (all stops—coef = 0.024, 95%CI = 0.006, 0.043; frisking—coef = 0.048, 95%CI = 0.015, 0.080; use of force—coef = 0.109, 95%CI = 0.028, 0.190). Our findings indicate that a one standard deviation increase in police stops equates to a 2.72% increase in psychiatric ED visits among Black residents in NYC. Use of force may have the greatest mental health consequences due to perceived threats of physical violence or bodily harm to other members of the targeted group. Racially biased and unconstitutional police encounters may have acute mental health implications for the broader Black community not directly involved in the encounter itself.

Objectives Test the impact of a mobile technology device, including a street check app, on street checks and crime incidents reported. Methods We used a cluster randomised control trial design, assigning 1227 frontline officers to the experimental condition (assigned device) and 2225 officers to the control condition (not assigned device), clustered by police region. We measured the impact of the mobility device on street checks and crime incidents reported. We used difference-in-difference tests with a negative binomial approach examining time (pre- and post-intervention) and condition (experimental vs control). Results We found a statistically significant interaction between time and condition. Frontline police officers issued with mobile devices recorded significantly more police street checks than those without devices, alongside a small increase in the reporting of summary offence incidents. Conclusions Efficiency gains associated with mobile devices, including street check activity, need to be carefully managed and translated into policing outcomes that promote proactive, targeted and procedurally just policing practice.