USA TODAY International Edition
One city’s solution in policing? Fewer stops
Shift in traffic stops, searches led to changes
FAYETTEVILLE, N. C. – Before dawn one morning, a woman in her late 60s was pulled over by a police officer. The officer said she’d run a stop sign.
She denied the charge. She was trying to get to her Bible studies class, she told him. He ran her license and concluded the stop with a warning. The incident disturbed her nevertheless. Though he did not ticket her, the officer questioned her reason for being out that morning – it was too early for Bible study groups, he said.
This did not sit well with her Bible study group that day in 2013, especially one of its newer attendees, whose husband was the new police chief. She relayed the incident.
Harold Medlock was exasperated. “It never occurred to me that I would have a cop out there doing everything wrong, from the way you treat somebody to the basic protocols and procedures for traffic stop,” he said.
Medlock had arrived in Fayetteville convinced that the Police Department’s focus regarding motor vehicles should be on speeding, stop sign/ light violations, DWI and reckless driving – moving violations of immediate concern to public safety.
Stopping drivers for nonmoving violations such as equipment failures or expired registration ought to be minimized or avoided altogether, he told his department.
Less than two months earlier, a Fayetteville officer had fatally shot a man after a traffic stop.
Across the country, police pull over 50,000 drivers on a typical day, more than 20 million motorists a year. The traffic stop is the most common policecitizen interaction.
Police and activists agree that these stops are fraught with danger for both citizens and police. Medlock knew there was a complicated way to fix this, and a simple one. He went with the simple: Get cops out of the habit of pulling over people unless they needed to do so to protect the safety of others on the road.
In North Carolina, police make about a million traffic stops a year. Half of those, according to Frank Baumgartner, political science professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, are not safety- related stops.
He said stopping a driver because of a broken taillight or equipment violation does little for safety. “And it comes with a cost in terms of public trust and confidence in the police.”
Baumgartner, co- author of “Suspect Citizens: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race,” said another concern is the use of traffic stops as a pretext for further investigations.
“The difficulty people are having is that a traffic stop is not really a traffic stop. It’s an opportunity for the police to do an informal criminal investigation,” he said. An analysis by Baumgartner and his colleagues shows that out of 20 million traffic stops in the state, only 2% led to arrests.
Across a span of 100 years, the growth of citizen automobility brought with it thousands of local, state and federal laws focused on policing people in their vehicles, according to Sarah Seo, professor at Columbia Law School and the author of “Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.”
Seo said, “Public safety and traffic law enforcement merged with criminal investigations. And that was the basis for expanding the police’s discretionary power.”
The modern symbol of American freedom, Seo noted, is also the space in which Americans are most regulated by laws and subject to ever more intrusive discretionary policing. Supreme Court justices have said practically anyone could be pulled over for a perceived technical violation of motor vehicle law.
Data from police departments shows that those pulled over in discretionary traffic stops tend to be disproportionately Black.
In Fayetteville from 2013 to 2016, under Medlock’s directions, stops for nonmoving violations went way down; investigative stops went to zero all four years; and stops for speeding increased.
The number of Black drivers searched from 2013 to 2016 declined by nearly 50% compared with the previous four years, according to state data.
In the preceding four years, 5,980 Black drivers had been searched. That number went down to 3,059 during Medlock’s four years as chief.
Focused traffic enforcement for moving violations such as speed or red light violations skyrocketed from 13,000 a year to 46,000 a year in four years.
The policing had its effect on its main target: Traffic fatalities went down.
Medlock was excited when he saw what other numbers decreased. “Uses of force went down, injuries to citizens and officers went down, and complaints against officers went down.”
Baumgartner said focusing enforcement efforts on safety- related violations will build trust between the police and residents.
“It will have a big impact on poor people. It will have a big impact on people who drive older cars, and it will have a very big impact on Black and Hispanic drivers, because if they knew that they were only going to get pulled over for running through a stop sign or excessive speeding, they will feel much more confident that they could be treated fairly by their police,” he said.
Mike Aikens of Anderson, South Carolina, said that as a Black man, he feels uncomfortable when he’s driving and sees a police vehicle behind him. And he’s a cop.
There’s a reason Aikens said he had “the talk” with his sons about how to behave if they are pulled over: “I’d be a liar if I said that I’m not worried when I am off duty and in my plain clothes and a cop gets behind me. What if they don’t know me? What will happen?”
The Fayetteville statistics would not have stopped him from having that talk with his sons. “Does taking away certain stops take away worry? No. Because you never know for sure what is going to happen.”
James McCabe said officers are under pressure to show their value. The criminal justice professor at Sacred Heart University and 20- year veteran of the New York Police Department said a traditional way to do that is to enforce traffic rules when not answering calls. McCabe said that in most departments, “you’ll see an overwhelming concentration of self- initiated traffic stops by the police.”
Additional patrol time freed because of a reduction in stops could be spent addressing crime trends and working with the community, he said.
Baumgartner said police agencies should de- emphasize all traffic laws in North Carolina except speeding, DWI, running stop signs or lights and other “unsafe movement.”
From 2010- 2019, law enforcement agencies made about 526,000 traffic stops, according to data provided to the state by police. Of those stops, only 187,300 stops were for speeding, DWI, stop sign or stoplight violations.
If police followed a plan similar to Medlock and Baumgartner’s ideas, nearly 65% of those stops – more than 338,000 traffic stops – would never have happened.
Assuming 15 minutes of officer time for each stop, that’s almost 85,000 officer hours.
Early in his term as police chief, Medlock was on his way to a City Council meeting when a call came in: Cops were fighting with rowdy teens. The chief turned around and headed to the scene.
When he arrived, he saw two of his officers playing basketball with the neighborhood kids. There was no fight. Someone who didn’t want the kids playing basketball in the street called it in as a fight.
Medlock engaged some other neighborhood kids. They talked about school and yearbooks, he said. Officers from the department joined in. This was impromptu community policing at work, he said. It was one of his most memorable moments.
“We shouldn’t be in our cars waiting for that next 911 call,” he said. “We should be engaged with the community. We should be addressing problems with the community that are important to that particular neighborhood.”
He said in community policing, “you gain a tremendous amount first of relationship building and trust. And when you have trusted people, they’re going to share information with you.”
Medlock knows no approach is perfect. “But at the end of the day, you’re not harassing people, you’re not making them mad, and you’re not fishing.”