I’m willing to throw caution to the wind, live on the wild side, journey into the danger zone.
Yes, yes, yes. I’m willing to take my chances living in a country where drivers who hang air fresheners from their rear view mirrors, don’t use their turn signals, toddle around town with a broken taillight, aren’t subject to being stopped and pulled over by the police. Let cops take down their license plate number and mail them a summons. But, please don’t ask them to make a meaningless stop that could end with a cop preemptively shooting an unarmed motorist.
Opinions | Traffic enforcement would be safer without police. Here’s how it could work. Jordan Woods A makeshift memorial is seen April 20 in Brooklyn Center, Minn., at the site of the fatal shooting of Daunte Wright by a police officer during a traffic stop. (Morry Gash/AP) The tragic death of 20-year-old Daunte Wright is a vivid reminder that police traffic stops can have deadly consequences for people of color, and Black drivers in particular. Studies show that police disproportionately stop people of color, often for pretextual reasons, and subject them to additional intrusive police activity through questioning, searching, citing, arresting and applying force. Too often these encounters end in violence.
Such incidents are again drawing protest after two violent episodes following traffic stops. In suburban Minneapolis, not far from where George Floyd was killed in a police encounter, a veteran cop recently killed a 20-year-old Black man, Daunte Wright, after he was stopped for expired registration tags. (Wright’s mother told reporters that when she talked to her son moments before he was shot, he said police raised concern about an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror.) In Virginia, a Black and Latino Army officer sued after he was pepper spraying, struck and handcuffed after being pulled over for not having a permanent license plate on his new SUV.
On Sunday, a police officer shot and killed Daunte Wright, an unarmed Black man, after pulling him over for hanging an air freshener from his rearview mirror. Wright’s death is just the latest instance of police assaulting and killing drivers specifically, Black men who pose no danger following a routine traffic stop. Philando Castile, Walter Scott, and Sam DuBose were all shot and killed by police after a traffic stop; none of them posed any danger to the officers who took their lives.
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Racism surely plays a role here, but there is another reason so many appalling police shootings involve motorists: Law enforcement officers are taught that routine traffic stops pose extreme danger to their own lives. Courts have seized upon this idea to water down the constitutional rights of drivers, justifying police brutality on the grounds that officers must act quickly to protect themselves against the random violence that always lurks just around the corner.
Last week, Indiana governor Eric Holcomb vetoed a bill that would limit gubernatorial authority in declaring emergencies. The bill would allow the General Assembly to call itself into an emergency session, with the idea that the legislature could then vote to end, or otherwise limit, a governor’s emergency powers. Although both the legislature and the governor’s office are controlled by Republicans, the legislature has apparently wearied of the governor’s repeated renewals of the state’s emergency status in the name of managing the effects of the covid-19 virus.
The legislature could still override the veto. In Indiana, an override requires only a majority vote.