Traffic stops and my year as Hartford’s inspector general
Many criminal justice reform advocates have long wanted to remove police from enforcing traffic stops. For most residents of Connecticut, it is hard to understand why. After a year as Inspector General in Hartford, it’s no longer a mystery to me. The traffic enforcement tactics in 12 cases I oversaw in Hartford that went before the Civilian Police Review Board would be unrecognizable to many of Connecticut’s suburban residents. Some of these tactics result in legal violations, and many of them are perfectly legal, even though they ultimately undermine the rule of law. Traffic stops are the single most common interaction between the police and the public. The most clear objection to the police conducting traffic stops is that they can all too often turn fatal for motorists. Between 2016 and 2021, police officers nationwide killed 400 unarmed motorists who were not being pursued for violent crime. These statistics are real people and some have become household names; last year we saw traffic stops result in the death of Jayland Walker in Ohio and Tyre Nichols in Tennessee.
But beyond the most extreme headlines are more mundane traffic encounters that do not make the news. In an “ordinary” traffic stop familiar to most Nutmeggers, one police car will observe a moving violation, pull up behind the vehicle in question, turn on their lights and the motorist will pull over. The motorist will sit in the car and wait for a ticket to be issued. This is what has happened to me in the past; this may have happened to you.
However, for a set of residents — all of whom were Black and brown in my experience — traffic enforcement can look very different. In these instances, the police will observe a moving violation such as speeding, failure to use a turn signal, tinted windows. They will surround the vehicle with three cars. They will pull the vehicle to the side of the road. Then, they will approach the vehicle with six or seven officers to issue a ticket. When the police reach the car, they will then
usually order the individuals — the driver and any passengers — out of the car to wait as they write the ticket.
Residents treated this way by the public servants they pay to employ are often confused and angry. The disproportionate show of police force for a traffic violation makes them distrustful of the police; an order to step out of the car only escalates the encounter between the resident and the officer involved.
But this is all completely legal. There is no law or local regulation that dictates how many police officers are used in a traffic stop. And the U.S. Supreme Court has said, the police officers are free to issue orders for drivers to step out of a car for no reason at all. States or cities could limit police officers’ freedom to do so, but without such local limitations, the federal courts have given police officers free reign.
The Supreme Court cited the interest in
protecting police officer safety when it upheld the police’s unmitigated freedom to order motorists out of their cars. However, 40 years later, additional research has found that the Supreme Court’s analysis was based on faulty data. Ordering motorists out of their cars actually is a greater threat to police officer safety.
Defenders of this system will say that they are key tools in deterring worse crimes — that stopping a car for a moving violation, without any evidence that a greater crime has occurred — can help produce evidence of other crimes. The data tells a different story. The 2020 Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project found that car searches following routine traffic stops produced contraband in less than 7% of vehicles — and most of the time that contraband was marijuana. The study found that investigating
illegal activity directly is much more likely to produce evidence of crimes.
The inefficiency is one problem.
The threat to our democratic system is another problem. Using traffic stops to “generate” probable cause to search cars only seeds bad will in the communities that get over-policed. The citizens I’ve met who were subject to these perfectly legal tactics all lost faith in the government that was supposed to serve them. Each of these citizens has friends and family with whom they share their stories. Each of them is telling someone else how their public servants mistreated them. And each time that happens, it chips away at the foundations of our local governments.
Nothing could be more telling than the reaction of one complainant, who was in a car that was pulled over for the failure to use a turn signal. When the car was surrounded by three police cars and the occupants ordered out of the vehicle, the complainant desperately asked what was going on. This was not how traffic stops usually occurred, she argued. “This is extra!” she said.
Indeed.
Liam Brennan, a candidate for mayor in New Haven, served as Inspector General in Hartford from February 2022 to March 2023.