Why police traffic stops turn deadly
Review: Over 400 unarmed motorists killed in past 5 years
“Open the door now! You are going to get shot!” an officer in Rock Falls, Illinois, shouted at Nathaniel Edwards after a car chase.
“Hands out the window now, or you will be shot!” yelled a patrolman in Bakersfield, California, as Marvin Urbina wrestled with inflated air bags after a pursuit ended in a crash.
“I am going to shoot you; what part of that don’t you understand?” threatened an officer in Little Rock, Arkansas, adding a profanity, as she tried to pry James Hartsfield from his car.
The police officers who issued those warnings had stopped the motorists for common offenses: swerving across double yellow lines, speeding recklessly, carrying an open beer bottle. None of the men were armed. Yet within moments of pulling them over, officers fatally shot all three.
The deaths are among a series of seemingly avoidable killings across the country. Over the past five years, a New York Times investigation found, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife or under pursuit for a violent crime — a rate of more than one a week.
Most of the officers did so with impunity. Only five have been convicted of crimes in those killings, according to a review of the publicly reported cases. Yet local governments paid at least $125 million to resolve about 40 wrongful-death lawsuits and other claims. Many stops began with common traffic violations like broken taillights or running a red light; relative to the population, Black drivers were overrepresented among those killed.
The recurrence of such cases and the rarity of convictions both follow from an overstatement, ingrained in court precedents and police culture, of the danger that vehicle stops pose to officers. Claiming a sense of mortal peril — whether genuine in the moment or only asserted later — has often shielded officers from accountability for using deadly force.
“We get into what I would call anticipatory killings,” said Sim Gill, the district attorney for Salt Lake County, Utah. “We can’t give carte blanche to that.”
In case after case, officers said they had feared for their lives. And in case after case, prosecutors declared the killings of unarmed motorists legally justifiable.
But The New York Times reviewed video and audio recordings, prosecutor statements and court documents, finding patterns of questionable police conduct that went beyond recent high-profile deaths of unarmed drivers. Evidence often contradicted the accounts of law enforcement officers.
Dozens of encounters appeared to turn on what criminologists describe as officer-created jeopardy: Officers regularly — and unnecessarily — placed themselves in danger by standing in front of fleeing vehicles or reaching inside car windows, then fired their weapons in what they later said was self-defense. Frequently, officers also appeared to exaggerate the threat.
In many cases, local police officers, state troopers or sheriff’s deputies responded with outsize aggression to disrespect or disobedience — a driver talking back, revving an engine or refusing to get out of a car, what officers sometimes call “contempt of cop.”
In dashboard and body camera footage, officers could be seen shooting at cars driving away, or threatening deadly force in their first words to motorists, or surrounding sleeping drivers with a ring of gun barrels — then shooting them when, startled awake, they tried to take off. More than three-quarters of the unarmed motorists were killed while attempting to flee.
Some families of the drivers said that their relatives were not blameless.
“I don’t have my head buried in the sand,” said Deborah Lilly, whose 29-year-old son, Tyler Hays, had drugs in his car and tried to run away when he was pulled over for tinted windows last year by a sheriff ’s deputy in Hamilton County, Tennessee. “I am just saying he did not deserve to get shot in the back.”
Almost all of the officers involved in these cases declined to comment or could not be reached.
Traffic stops are by far the most common police encounters with civilians, and officers have reason to be wary in their approach: They do not know who is inside a car or whether there are weapons.
Ten officers have been killed this year in such interactions, including a Chicago officer who was shot in August by a passenger during a traffic stop for an expired registration.
But some police chiefs and criminologists said that alarmist training about vehicle stops has made officers too quick to shoot at times, resulting in needless killings. Academies and commanding officers often rely on misleading statistics, gory cop-killing videos and simulated worst-case scenarios to instill hypervigilance.
“All you’ve heard are horror stories about what could happen,” said Sarah Mooney, assistant police chief in West Palm Beach, Florida. “It is very difficult to try to train that out of somebody.”
The overemphasis on danger has fostered tolerance for police misconduct at vehicle stops, some argue.
“Prosecutors and courts give more leeway to officers’ decisions to use force at vehicle stops, as a result of the exaggerated concern about the potential for officers getting hurt,” said Michael Gennaco, a consultant to police departments on officer accountability and a former Justice Department prosecutor. “Officers would likely kill fewer drivers if there were deterrence.”
Of the roughly 280 officers killed on duty since late 2016, about 60 died — mostly by gunfire — at the hands of motorists who had been pulled over, a Times analysis showed. (About 170 other officers died in accidents on the job.)
But the assertions about the heightened danger ignore the context: Vehicle stops far outnumber every other kind of police dealings with civilians.
Because the police pull over so many cars and trucks — tens of millions each year — an officer’s chances of being killed at any vehicle stop are less than 1 in 3.6 million, excluding accidents, two studies have shown.
At stops for common traffic infractions, the odds are as low as 1 in 6.5 million, according to a 2019 study by Jordan Blair Woods, a law professor at the University of Arkansas.
“The risk is statistically negligible, but nonetheless it is existentially amplified,” said Gill, the Salt Lake County district attorney and an outspoken proponent of increased police accountability.
Many of the fatal vehicle stops reviewed by the Times unfolded in a similar way: Officers acted as if their lives were in constant peril and killed drivers who failed to obey orders.
“The fear is excessive,” said Grant Fredericks, an authority on the forensic analysis of dash and body camera footage and a former officer who has examined scores of police shootings at vehicle stops. “The more fear officers feel, the more aggressive they become.”
But no degree of fright, he said, explained the approach of some officers, who often threatened or used deadly force in response to mere defiance.
“The reaction sometimes seems to be, ‘How dare you?” Fredericks said. “‘How dare you not do what you’re told to do?’ ”