Lawmakers ponder rise in highway deaths as state police stops decline
Traffic-related deaths in Connecticut are up over last year with increased speeding during the pandemic as one suspected cause. Despite that, Connecticut State Police are pulling drivers over less often.
That apparent contradiction was on the agenda Thursday as the bipartisan leadership of the legislative Public Safety Committee and the state’s top public safety official met in a closed meeting to discuss priorities ahead of the Feb. 9 start of the legislative session.
“Fatalities are up and traffic stops are down drastically,” said Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, the ranking House Republican on the committee. “I know from my experience those two things are related.”
Howard, a Stonington police detective, said a variety of factors are at play including COVID-19 and directives early in the pandemic for law enforcement to minimize contact with the public. Another factor: staffing.
But Howard also attributed the decline in enforcement to low morale among officers who fear being accused of wrongdoing under a 2020 police accountability law.
“If a car goes by speeding and you don’t pull it over, you don’t get sued,” Howard said in an interview Thursday after the meeting. “They’re concerned. ‘Am I going to get sued for every little thing I do?” They’re trying to limit their liability the best way they can.”
The law, passed with mostly Democratic support, was drafted in response to nationwide protests against police brutality and abuse that followed the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis.
Republicans have said the legislation hamstrings the ability of law enforcement to perform their duties. But Democrats have argued that the effort, which includes tougher rules on police searches and the use of deadly force, is meant to hold bad officers accountable and does not have an impact on enforcement efforts.
Andrew Matthews, a retired sergeant who is executive director of the state troopers union, also tied the decrease in traffic stops to troopers morale, largely due to the police accountability legislation. A push by lawmakers last year for a pilot program to install specialized cameras in work zones to monitor speed is another indication they don’t trust law enforcement to do its job, Matthews said.
“Morale is down. They don’t feel supported,” he said. “The legislature is talking about subjecting them to more criminal and civil penalty.”
Brian Foley, a top aide to state police commissioner James Rovella, deferred comments about Thursday’s meeting to lawmakers on the public safety committee.
The Democratic co-chairs of the committee, Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, and Rep. Maria Horn, D-Salisbury, said the discussion with Rovella was wide-ranging, a routine part of their duties to develop proposals to tackle public safety in the 2022 legislative session.
“Certainly highway safety came up,” Horn said, but lawmakers are still debating how to tackle the issue.
Traffic-related fatalities in the state are up nearly 16 percent from last year, with 290 fatal collisions as of Nov. 12. There were 257 fatal crashes in 2020 and 216 in 2019.
“We don’t know what the causes are,” Horn said of the highway safety data. “Before we leap to any conclusions, we need to look a little more at what’s going on.”
Staffing also came up at Thursday’s meeting. Matthews said there are about 950 troopers currently compared to about 1,200 about 10 years ago. A surge of state employee retirements is expected to occur this year ahead of June 30 when pension rule changes go into effect, and that could include hundreds of state troopers.
“We know that staffing is challenged, which is why we approved two new trooper classes in the new budget,” Horn said, referring to biennium budget currently in effect.
The number of traffic stops conducted by state police has decreased since 2014 with a sharp decline beginning in mid-March 2020, just as the state began to lock down due to the pandemic. Enforcement remained low for much of 2020 and the first part of 2021 — but in August of last year, traffic stops approached pre-pandemic totals.
That’s according to the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy at the University of Connecticut, which has analyzed state data on traffic enforcement.
The data shows there were 157,000 traffic stops conducted by state police in 2019. The total dropped to nearly 76,000 in 2020 and reached nearly 112,000 in the first 11 months of 2021.
State police are also issuing fewer infractions. In 2021, 44 percent of state police stops resulted in an infraction compared with 60 percent in 2020 and 67 percent in 2019. State police have issued more warnings in 2021 — though the data is incomplete — than even before the pandemic, according to the UConn institute.