Oregon Forgives More Than $1.8 Million in Unpaid Traffic Fees

“The inability to pay a traffic fine should not deprive a person of the ability to lawfully drive to work, school, health care appointments or other locations to meet their daily needs,” Brown said in a statement. “We know that suspending driver’s licenses for unpaid traffic fines is bad public policy – it is inequitable, ineffective and makes it harder for low-income Oregonians to get ahead.”

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Civil rights advocates praised the move, saying it’s necessary to end systemic discrimination that hurts people unable to pay traffic fines.

“People of color are disproportionately targeted in traffic enforcement meaning they are more likely to be ticketed and receive a traffic fine,” Sandy Chung, executive director of American Civil Liberties Union or ACLU of Oregon, said in a statement. “Persistent racial discrimination in public and private life, as well as enduring racial disparity in economic opportunity, means people of color are more likely to be low income. This means that it is more widespread for people of color to have a driver’s license suspension due to inability to pay a ticket. They are more likely to be trapped in a cycle of debt, punishment and restricted freedoms than wealthier and whiter people.”

America’s flat-fine model also disproportionately burdens racial minorities, who are poorer on average and more likely to be pulled over. In many American cities, police are more likely to stop, ticket, and search people of color. In the Cleveland, Ohio, suburb of Newburgh Heights, for example, Black residents make up 22 percent of the population but 76 percent of license and insurance violations and 63 percent of speeding cases. And for Black Americans, routine traffic stops can turn deadly, as the police killings of Philando Castile, Maurice Gordon, and Daunte Wright each demonstrate. For this reason, recent police-reform initiatives in cities such as Berkeley, California, have focused on ending police involvement in the traffic stop. But one alternative, automated camera enforcement, risks entrenching and accelerating the criminalization of poverty. The camera enforcer might ticket without bias or violence but will also likely issue more tickets.

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In many modern American states, low-level traffic offenders face both physical danger and financial ruin. In 2019 in Rochester, New York, Desiree Barron was rushing home to take her insulin when she was pulled over for speeding. During this stop, she learned that her license had been suspended because of more than $3,000 in unpaid tickets. Police arrested Barron and ignored her requests for insulin. In jail, cut off from her medication for days, she nearly died before her doctor and public defender intervened, according to a 2019 lawsuit. In December 2020, then–New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill ending driver’s-license suspensions for unpaid traffic fines. But compounding fines, and the practice of jailing debtors, continue in New York and many other states.