Cities Test A New Way To Reduce Police Violence

activists continue to voice their concerns and demand chake. Five police officers are charged in the death of Tyrene Nichols, twenty nine year old black man in Memphis, who was brutally beaten after being pulled over. Nichols death has renewed attention to traffic stops. City councils in several US cities have passed or are working on legislation to limit reasons police can pull a person over. In part, it's intended

to reduce police contact with citizens. The first thing we're trying to do is address the idea of driving ball black. A lot of people have stories and narratives that put them in a position where they feel like they've been pulled over for the color of their skin. That's Philadelphia Councilman Isaiah Thomas. He led the city's effort to curtail police stops for minor violations like a hanging air freshener or a broken tail light. We'll hear more from him

later in the program. First, my Bloomberg colleague Sarah Holder and Fola Kennaby. They've been reporting all about this and they join me now from New York. Sarah, you've been reporting on police stops for City Lab. What is the day to tell you about how frequent traffic stops by police are? How big a problem this is. Traffic stops are the most common police come into contact with the

public every day. You know, police conduct around twenty million traffic stops every year, and a small fraction of those turn violent or deadly. But when you look at the data on police violence and police killings in America, you can see that seven percent of deadly police encounters started with a traffic stop. Last year. Between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty one, ten percent of all of the deadly

police killings started with a traffic stop. So these are a really common way that police come into contact with the public, and sometimes they can go wrong and full of we're seeing this in cities across America. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. New York City, which is where we're based, actually had to release traffic stop data for the first time in twenty twenty two. In New York City. There were six hundred seventy three thousand traffic stops in twenty

twenty two alone. Now, talking to the NYPD about these stops, they say that, you know, they're an important part of their enforcement practices. Only about two percent of those stops resulting and arrests. And there is actually a similar story for pedestrian stops, which there's a much richer history of data for. And what's the most common reason somebody gets stopped. There's a whole range of reasons why someone might get

stopped by police in a car. You know, some of them are for offenses that do impact traffic safety, like speeding or running a red light. Others you might not even know are legal, like having something dangling from your rear view mirror that obscures vision, or driving without your license plate illuminated by a light, or having a noisy

exhaust pipe. Police can use a whole variety of reasons to pull someone over and advocates argue that some of these more minor violations are used by police as a pretext to search a car for contraband like guns or drugs, And as fully just mentioned, in city after city, you see that a lot of the times those pretext stops

aren't very effective. You know, in San Francisco, some of these minor violations turned up a gun or led to an arrest, you know, less than two percent of the time as well, and in fill It you're seeing the same thing. Traffic safety is a big issue on America's roads. In twenty twenty one, forty thousand people were killed in car accidents, So this is a major issue of concern, but not all of these traffic stops are really addressing

the root causes of that traffic violence. Thinking about New York again, beyond the outcomes of the stop, we also see huge racial disparities in the stop. Roughly sixty percent of the stops involve black or Latino motorists, and that's of course disproportionate to the population of those folks in the city. Like Sarah mentioned earlier, can sometimes lead to deadly encounters, and beyond that can lead to distrust or a feeling that communities are being targeted by officers. Yeah,

those disparities hold naturally as well. A study of nearly one hundred million traffic stops found that black drivers were twenty percent more likely than white drivers to be pulled over, and black drivers are more likely to be stopped and searched, but they're not more likely to hold these kinds of

illegal materials than white drivers, like guns and drugs. You can see that the disproportionate stopping is not necessarily leading to better outcomes for traffic safety, but it is leading to a disproportionate amount of encounters between black motorists and police on the roads. So one very public recent example of that was Tyreny Nichols death in police hands, and that has led cities really to take a new look

at traffic stops, Is that right, Yeah. After the killing of George Floyd in twenty twenty, peaceful protests across the country have far outnumbered incidents of violence stemming from the killing of George Floyd. Philadelphia was one of the first cities to look out traffic stops as a way to

limit these police in public interactions. A council member there fought to pass a law that would limit police from making traffic stops for some of these minor violations that we mentioned, including like a dangling air freshmener or expired registration, as long as that registration hadn't been expired for more than sixty days. So he worked with the police department there and with advocates on the ground to pass this legislation, and we'll be seeing some data on how that's been

working in the next few weeks. In Memphis, a city council member has proposed legislation doing the same thing as Philadelphia once did. She's targeting several low level violations that police typically pull drivers over for and making it so that police can no longer pull over people just for these low level violations. People can still be cited for having late registration or inexpired omissions check documentation, but they can't be the only reason that police pull someone over.

And again, that's to try to limit the kinds of interactions that led to Nichols's death. In Memphis, police say that they pulled mister Nichols over for reckless driving, but the police chief there says there still hasn't been enough evidence to prove whether that was the case or not to connect to New York City. The city Council passed a law a few years ago to require the reporting of the vehicle stops, and twenty twenty two is the

first year for which we have that data. But going back to nineteen ninety nine, another high profile of police gilling here the shooting of Amadu Dialloy for police officers.

Today marks twenty four years since Amadu Diallo was shot and killed by police officers with the NYPD's Street Crimes Unit required the city to report pedestrian stops as a result, and so to that end, last year in twenty twenty two, there were fifteen thousand pedestrian stops and so that's on top of the six hundred and seventy three thousand vehicle stops. Of the fifteen thousand pedestrian stops, ninety percent of them

were black or Latino folks walking around the street. Yeah, after these kinds of high profile killings by police that start with a traffic stop, like the death of Filando Castile, what began as a routine traffic stop turned deadly. Wednesday, family members confirmed that thirty two year old Folando Castile has died Dante Right. The police chief says they stopped Dante Wright because he had an expired registration on his

license plate, and now Tyree Nichols. There have been ever to look at the practice and reform it in New York City, in Memphis, in Philadelphia, in states like Virginia, and also in cities in California like Berkeley and Oakland. They've tried to take police out of traffic stops entirely and to civilianize the practice. They've run into issues with the state sort of coming after them saying they're not

allowed to make those kinds of local level adjustments. Do the cities and police departments that are reducing the number of low level traffic stops say that they're doing it to reduce the number of times that police kill a motorists. Oftentimes, these reforms are framed within the context of broader public

safety goals. So as we were saying, a lot of these pretextual stops don't result in an arrest, they don't even result in finding a weapon or drugs or anything that might make the public safer, And there are also a time suck for a lot of police departments, So framing it from a public safety standpoint. It's clear that there are issues with the way that police today enforce

the rules of the road. But there's of course disagreement about how far these reforms should go, and whether you pretextual stops are needed, and whether police are needed on the roads to be enforcing these laws. You know, there's fear that if police pull back from doing traffic stops entirely, pedestrians will be less safe. And these changes aren't necessarily coming from police departments. They're coming from policymakers who are trying to reverse some of these racial disparities that we

see again both in pedestrian and in vehicle stops. And I'll just note that when writing about the number of stops in New York City, I spoke with the NYPD and they defended their use of these stops, both pedestrian and vehicle stops, and they said that they called them an essential tool in their crime finding capabilities, and that you know, they're using an increased precision to make the stops.

It's interesting after a year of this policy being in place in Philadelphia, where police start pulling over fewer drivers for these minor offenses. Preliminary data shows that traffic stops overall are down slightly, but that the amount of contraband that's actually been picked up has doubled. So doing these more targeted stops appears to be having a positive impact in some of the policing strategies that departments across the

country tend to favor. If the solution to police violence against citizens is to limit the number of times police can get near citizens, it seems like sort of a big failure in thinking about policing that instead of saying, hey, we have to make sure that cops aren't violent and killing people, we say we're just going to keep cops away from people. A lot of the reforms of the last few years have been to try to stop police from taking such an outsize role in many parts of

public life, like Roofstine. Cities try to address mental health calls or calls on how people not by police but by social workers. We're seeing this in traffic enforcement as well. It does speak to a broader issue that the culture of policing is violent, and advocates would argue that there are broader reforms and structural reforms needed. A lot of times, what cities have under their control is the amount of responsibilities and the amount of time the police spend interacting

with the public. And there are broader, more structural reforms that advocates have been pushing for that would address the deeper culture of policing that's led to so many of these violent encounters. Police departments in some places are asked to be you know, social workers, are asked to be emergency responders, are asked to be you know, public safety agents as well. And so we've seen cities like Austin, for example, remove forensic departments from the police department's per view.

We've seen cities think about having a non police in parks. This push has been to sort of roll back the reach of an agencies that has been asked to do more than I think folks really originally intend, Sarah. The US Congress has also started to take an interest in

this question of police stops. Yeah, a Democratic House representative from New York or to Torres, has introduced legislation that would incentivize cities and states to take police out of traffic enforcement, either by civilianizing their traffic enforcement duties or turning to technology like speed cameras and things like that.

So he sort of talks about this perverse incentive for making traffic stops, where a lot of cities really depend on the fines and fees that are extracted from motorists because of all the issues that we are discussing, Torres says that there should be more of an incentive not to conduct extra stops or disproportionate stops just for that

financial reason. So he's proposing a one hundred million dollar grant under the Department of Justice that would reward cities that really take a look at their traffic enforcement and try to think of a way to do it better. I think it'll be important to look at whether these laws stick at all, whether they do spread. Already, you're seeing in Philadelphia, the police union has sued the city

over this law. You're seeing in Pittsburgh, which followed Philadelphia's lead in passing similar legislation limiting these low level police stops, the police chief has told officers not to follow it anymore, pending more training. You're seeing in Virginia, Republican House trying to vote to overturn some of these more sweeping laws

limiting low level stops as well. So you're already seeing a backlash brewing even where these reforms have been made, and we've seen that with the movement to defund or cut funding from police or reallocate resources away from police in the wake of George Floyd's killing. So I think the first thing to pay attention to is whether these

promises are followed up on. Part of it is also the accountability and the data transparency and the follow up to see whether police departments are actually taking this training with them into the fields, whether they're actually following the letters of these laws that have been passed, because we've seen you in places like Minneapolis, which was seen a sort of a bastion of police reform before the killing

of George Floyd. Like a lot of laws on paper don't really do much when you have sort of this culture of violence and policing where you have bad actors in the field, or you have these perverse incentives and these disparities showing up time and time again. Sarah holder fula kind of you. Thanks so much for joining me today. Thanks so much, Thanks for having me. When we come back. How Philadelphia's experiment in limiting traffic stops is working out.

We heard how Philadelphia was the first city to put limits on routine traffic stops. Isaiah Thomas is the councilman who pushed for it, and he joins me, now, councilman,

you are behind the Driving Equality Act. Can you tell me what that is and and how it works sure Driving Equality in Philadelphia specifically, it's legislation that we introduced to acknowledge first and foremost that there's a problem between communities of color and law enforcement and to say that we're willing to take some steps in the direction to

try to rectify that particular issue. And so what the legislation does is it looks at how we enforce motor vehicle CO violations right now is predominantly with a traffic stop, and it changes the enforcement of minor motor vehicle CO violations that do not have a negative impact on public safety.

So what we did was we work with the police department and other stakeholders to determine a little more than a handful of motor vehicle coal violations that are now in its classification as it relates to enforcement as a

secondary level of enforcement. So for us in the city of Philadelphia, seat belts was already in this category if you were speeding or running a red light or committing a motor vehicle co violation as a public safety hazard, and you also didn't have your seat belt on, you would get it for that as well as not wearing

a seatbelt. We now put eight other around eight other motor vehicle co violations in that same category, and the legislation has put us in a position to be more efficient and hopefully what we'll see pretty soon in some improvements in a relationship between communities of color and law enforcement. Why did you think this legislation was needed? What is it trying to address? I mean, I think the first thing we're trying to do is address the idea of

driving about black. A lot of people have stories and narratives that puts them in a position where they feel like they've been pulled over for the color of their skin. When you talk to a lot of those same individuals white counterparts, their narratives and their experiences aren't the same.

We also looked at other issues as it relates to where we are as a municipality and trying to address how to be more efficient as a department, specifically looking at some of the hiring issues that we're having in a public sector as well as the private sector. We're

living in an era of the Great Resignation. But then also we were looking at just this idea of addressing racism and institutional issues that we know have disproportionately impacted people of color, And so the legislation has a number of different layers. You know, we're in twenty twenty three. Clearly we have a lot of issues as it relates to our municipality, and I'm sure big cities coming out of the pandemic across the country are facing similar issues.

And we just want to be innovative in our approach. Where you're talking about issues like crime and things of that capacity, we don't want to be random. We want to be specific. We want to target areas where we know people are committing issues that put them in a position in position to be incarcerated, and where we can use technologies such as minor motor vehicle co violations or secondary means of enforcement. We want to be able to do that so we can make sure we're maximizing everyone's time.

And so when we look at the eight motor vehicle co violations, we're talking about registration and a grace period on registration. We already had a thirty day grace period on registration in Philadelphia, So we just extended that a little bit to be able to also allow people to adjust to the fact that most of that stuff was done online or pandemic. We look at admission and inspection stickers,

which again is probably was already in that category. It's very difficult to see the admission and inspection stickers on a moving vehicle. We're looking at something dangling from the mirror, might damage to a bumper, the relocation of your license plate as long as it's visible in one tail, like being out. So these are the motor vehicle violations that we talk about in the midst of the Philadelphia version of Driving Equality to put us in a position to

address some of the issues I discussed earlier. A problem that happens is that when cops stop drivers, especially black drivers, there's a higher percented chance of something happening, and this just keeps cops away from people. Is that really a solution to the problem, or do you need to address the core problem that causes police to commit violence against citizens.

Of course, we need to address the core problem. But you know, when we first talked about the legislation, I think I said that the purpose of the bill is to first and foremost acknowledge that there is a problem. And I think in far too many spaces and in far too many commons stations, you will have people who will say that there isn't a problem. You will have people that say that we're overcritical as it relates to the relationships and the experiences of people of color and

law enforcement. So, by no means do I see this as a solution in the systemic and institutional racism and racist practices. But I do see it as a way of number one acknowledging that we do have a problem, and of course number two saying that we want to try to put us in a position to rectify that actual problem. Is it the end all, be all solution. Absolutely not, I'll be the first one to tell you that. But I do think it's a step in the right direction.

What did it take to pass this legislation? Did you encounter any resistance? I mean it started with a collaborative effort. I think that was the first step of passing a bill like this. It took us over a year to craft the legislation, to put together a coalition of people of stakeholders, which included the Police Department, the Mayor's team, the Public Defender's office, and other stakeholders to be able to come up with what we all could agree upon

as a relates to legislation. So it was very time consuming and consists of a lot of work. We had to talk to a lot of our legal partners to ensure that we were doing it in a way that could will stand in challenging court and to make sure that the bill couldn't be repealed based on it being some type of illegal legislation. So at the end of the day, the process was a very tedious one. We

tried to be as detail oriented as possible. We followed the data and talked to a lot of experts and put us in a position to be able to pass the bill. Pretty soon. We're going to be coming upon the one year anniversary since the implementation of the bill

because we had a collaborative effort. One of the things that the police department asked for was time for training, and so we gave him ample time for that and so overall the past the bill, it was a lot of steps, but you know, we also like to try to work with other elect officials across the city across

the country. I'm sorry who looking to replicate the legislation, because we understand not just the tedious process that we had to go through, but the coalition building that put us in a position to be successful, as well as some of the other legal matters that within the legislation towards ensure that it could will stand a court challenge or any type of legal resistance. Our conversation continues after the break. How did the Fraternal Order of Police in

Philadelphia respond to the legislation. I mean, we haven't been in dialogue with them about the legislation. They followed a lawsuit against the actual bill in court, and so we have ongoing legal matters that's actually happening right now as it relates to the FOP and their concerns around the legislation. But we're optimistic, based on the work that we've done and the experts that we work with and the legal team that we have, that it'll will stand that challenge.

The driving equality law has become something of a model, a blueprint for other cities. In Memphis, for example, where Tyree Nichols died in police custody, the city is now looking to replicate it. What would you like to see next to address this issue, which is something that we see all over the country. We like the idea of incentivizing cities all across the country to use technology as often as they can to address issues related to minor

motor vehicle co violations. I think that's the direction that we are encouraging governments to go in. There's no reason that some of the lessons that we learned during the pandemic can be applied to some of the institutional issues

that people of color experience all across the country. So driving equality is just a step first step in the direction of hopefully trying to put us in a position to assure that when we are having interactions between community and colors and law enforcement is not always a negative one.

We also recognize that within a lot of traffic stops, to push the police officer in a dangerous position, especially when they're patroling by themselves, And we also recognize that it makes us more efficient as a city and as government to be able to have our police focus on things that are a serious public safety hazard. Minor motor vehicle co violations are not a public serious public safety hazard when you look at issues around traffic and what

police do around addressing traffic. We want to pull them out of those areas as well too, because overall, we want to redefine what it means to police to have communities to police, and the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement. That's a big part of the direction that we want to go and moving forward, and we want to see some traction as it relates to improving the level of trust. Where do you make of this bill in Congress that would remove police from traffic stops?

First of all, I love the concept. I love the idea of the federal government incentivizing local governments to use things like technology and to invest in infrastructure to be able to be able to address modern motor vehicle co violations. You look at things like noise ordinances, You look at especially when you talk about like modified vehicles. You look

at things like something dangling from your mirror. You look at some of the minor issues that's in driving equality, and I love the idea of incentivizing cities to move away from that particular model because you know, I believe it's archaic when you look at crime and the issues that crime have created all across the country over the last you know, you could probably say the last fifty years, you know, post nineteen seventy, you know, crime has really

been driven by issues like poverty, issues like addiction and things in that capacity, and over police and neighborhoods will not put us in a position to address some of these systemic issues that unfortunately often hurt communities of color

worse than other neighborhoods. And so at the end of the day, when I think about the idea and the concept of legislation on the federal level incentivizing cities to use things like technology and other innovative measures to address minor violations, it puts us in a position, I think, to move effectively into the next decade, into into the future to see what it means to not just address this issue of driving while black, but to improve the ability for police to for police to do their job

and communities of color council in a Zaiah Thomas, thanks for speaking with me, Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio, app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The

Big Take is Vicky Bergolina. Our senior producer and the producer of this episode is Katherine Fink. Hildegarcia is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take.