Yahoo Autos San Fransisco Becomes Latest U.S. City to Attempt to Restrict Low-Level Traffic Stops
San Francisco’s Police Commission voted 4-2 this week to place limits on what circumstances police can pull over drivers in an effort to cut down on police disproportionately targeting people of color. Called the “pretext stop” policy, the new rule limits police from primarily stopping drivers over nine different low-level offenses, like failing to display registration tag or failing to use a turn signal, Axios reports.
Low-level traffic stops are often used by police as fishing expeditions targeting a disproportionate amount of people of color. In San Francisco, for instance, Black people make up five percent of the population, but account for 19 percent of all traffic stops made in the city, Axios reports. Countless studies reinforce the trend of pretextual stops disproportionally affecting people of color while such stops do little to cut down on crime, as reported in the New York Times.
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“There are a cluster of low-level traffic stops that are just not yielding any public safety benefit for the city,” Commission Vice President Max Carter-Oberstone told the San Francisco Standard. “But they do take up a lot of time and they do cost a lot of money and by curtailing those stops we can reallocate all of those law enforcement resources to other strategies that we know are effective.”
Critics say limiting police stops put the public in danger, but the Police Commission notes the new policy is merely a test balloon that will hopefully allow officers to focus on my serious crimes. The policy change now goes to the San Francisco Police Officers Association, which could slow down adoption of the limits considerably, the Standard reports. Police unions in general are not supportive of a restriction in pretexual stops, the Times reports.
