Traffic laws: Hard not to violate one of them
As of this writing, it isn’t clear why officers stopped Daunte Wright. Police say Wright, who was shot and killed Sunday when a veteran cop apparently mistook her gun for her Taser, had expired registration tags. But in a call before he died, Wright told his mother he was stopped because he had an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror.
While neither reason should have resulted in Wright losing his life, it would be especially absurd if something as simple and trivial as an air freshener contributed to the tragedy in a suburb of Minneapolis.
Yet in many states, including New York, a dangling air freshener can be probable cause to pull somebody over if it is deemed an illegal obstruction of the driver’s view. New York’s Vehicle and Traffic Law, Section 375, spells it out:
“It shall be unlawful for any Please see
person to operate a motor vehicle with any object placed or hung in or upon the vehicle, except required or permitted equipment of the vehicle, in such a manner as to obstruct or interfere with the view of the operator through the windshield, or to prevent him from having a clear and full view of the road and condition of traffic behind such vehicle.”
I confirmed that the law applies to air fresheners with the Department of Motor Vehicles. A Saratoga Springs defense attorney, Alan Lecours, told me he has represented clients ticketed for the offense.
It is also illegal in New York, by the way, to have a sticker on your back windshield, which means half the SUV drivers in suburbia could be stopped at any moment for advertising their preferred Adirondack Lake or the college choices of their children.
Most never will be. The judgment call rests with police. Problem is, those judgments are often discriminatory.
“There are so many traffic laws on the books that it’s almost impossible not to violate one of them,” said Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor who founded the school’s Policing Project. “Police have the discretion to pull over anybody they want, and when there’s discretion there’s almost always racial profiling.”
In other words, Black motorists like Wright are pulled over far more often than white motorists, as studies have repeatedly shown. And small infractions, like a dangling air freshener, are often the excuse for so-called pretextual interactions.
Friedman questions the validity of most traffic stops. While some are legitimate attempts at curbing speeding traffic, many more, he believes, are little more than excuses to snoop.
“We just assume that traffic enforcement by armed officers makes sense,” Friedman said. “But when you look at it, there’s plenty of reason to wonder if that’s true.”
It is indisputable that many of the controversial police confrontations with unarmed Black men in recent years came after stops for minor infractions rapidly escalated.
Eric Garner died in New York City during an arrest for selling cigarettes. Walter Scott died in South Carolina after being stopped for a broken taillight. George Floyd was accused only of passing a counterfeit bill. The examples could go on and on.
In Virginia recently, a uniformed Army medic who is Black, Lt. Caron Nazario, was hit with pepper spray after being stopped for not having a license plate — even though the temporary plate for his new truck was displayed in the window.
None of those stops helped to protect public safety. None were particularly necessary.
Some of you will say that many tragedies could be prevented if suspects didn’t resist arrest. I won’t argue, but I will maintain that “routine interactions” with police are far too routine, especially in poorer, diverse neighborhoods.
“We’ve created this system that just hoovers people in and gets them involved with the criminal justice system,” Friedman said, adding that the fiscal and emotional costs of the system are significant.
The life and death of Philando Castile is a perfectly tragic example. In 2016, he was killed by police during a traffic stop when he reached for his registration after telling police he had a weapon. (Castile had a concealed carry permit.)
A subsequent NPR investigation found that the 32-year-old Black man had been stopped at least 46 times by police, and only six of those stops were for moving violations or something else noticeable from outside the car. Castile, NPR said, had faced “a seemingly endless cycle of traffic stops, fines, court appearances, late fees, revocations and reinstatements.”
And then he was shot. Preventing such tragedies, Friedman believes, requires scaling back the number of reasons that police can stop motorists. Technological advances, he noted, mean that even expired registrations can be handled with a licenseplate reader and a summons in the mail.
New York lawmakers, meanwhile, can help by taking dumb laws off the books, including the one targeting air fresheners.