Driving equality law will crash and burn
Welcome to today’s edition of “Philadelphia: A Step-By-Step Guide To Self-Destruction,” where we count the ways in which the City of Brotherly Love shoots itself in the foot.
Our latest episode looks at City Council’s new legislation — passed almost unanimously, and which will soon garner Mayor Kenney’s signature — that prohibits police from properly enforcing, well … the law. Known as the “Driving Equality Bill,” it will prohibit police from stopping drivers who have committed motor vehicle infractions deemed “secondary violations.”
Instead, warnings or citations will be mailed to the alleged offender’s residence. The objective in prohibiting these so-called “pretextual stops” is to decrease the number of minorities pulled over — a practice, council says, is rooted in racism.
They don’t get it. Not only will the law not achieve the desired effect, but it will, ironically, end up hurting the very people it’s intended to help.
This column isn’t so naïve as to think that some people aren’t pulled over simply based on their skin color, under the guise of a vague (and sometimes invented) infraction. It happens, it’s wrong, and it’s akin to Stop-and-Frisk, which this author had repeatedly slammed as counterproductive and discriminatory. Our laws should be color-blind, without exception, since such impartiality helps mitigate the resentment felt by those singled out because of color, victimized by the perception that the police, and the law, have a double standard.
That said, let’s not confuse the issues at hand. Pulling someone over based on pigment is unacceptable; doing so because a motorist committed a violation is not. But that’s a distinction Philadelphia’s leaders fail to grasp. So instead of solving the problem — through better police recruitment, more public transparency, and constructive training free of political correctness and anti-police biases — they took the easy way out, playing the race card and giving lawbreakers a free pass. The answer isn’t to stop enforcing laws, but to ensure that they are enforced equally and impartially.
Most traffic stops are routine, but sometimes, they avert disaster on a grand scale. In fact, it was just such an ordinary stop on April 19, 1995 —when an officer pulled over a car without a license plate — that netted the deadliest mass murderer in U.S. history: Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. That doesn’t happen every day, obviously, but it’s not uncommon for an alert policeman to uncover something nefarious during a stop.
And, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that revenue from citations will decrease. Granted, police should never be acting in the capacity of “revenue collectors,” but, fact is, Philadelphia counts on such funds to help run the city. So when those monies decline, they’ll be made up elsewhere — “elsewhere” being more fees and taxes for which residents and businesses will bear the brunt, as if being one of the nation’s highest-taxed cities wasn’t a killer already. The result will be the continued exodus of companies and middle-class residents, leaving those who can’t vote with their feet to be penalized yet again.
Higher taxes result in fewer residents, businesses, and jobs, and, therefore, produce less revenue. In turn, that leads to diminished city services — which goes hand-in-hand with deliberately de-funding the police department at a time when the women and men in Blue are most needed.
But that’s just the beginning. Philadelphia owns the highest or near-highest rates of poverty, homelessness, violence and murder; its education system produces abysmal results; its city pension is catastrophically underfunded, and opening a business is fraught with bureaucracy.
And let’s not forget that the murder rate — the highest of any large city in America — is already 15 percent ahead of last year’s record-setting pace, and the number of shootings exceeds that of New York, despite the Big Apple being five time larger.
You know things are bad when you emulate anything in New Jersey. But that’s the direction in which Philly is moving. A Garden State law that went into effect this year bars police from enforcing underage drinking and marijuana laws, resulting in youth of all ages openly defying law enforcement by engaging in such illegal behavior. The result isn’t equality in the juvenile detention system, as intended, but kids running wild throughout the state, leaving a wake of chaos and lawlessness in their wake. Any wonder why Jersey continues to lead all states in the largest exodus of residents?
Since City Hall is ignoring the flashing red lights warning of such crash-and-burn laws, the most citations issued will be “One-Way” tickets out of Philly.