University of Arkansas
University of Arkansas law professor Jordan Blair Woods challenges the conventional wisdom that only police can enforce traffic laws.
In “Traffic Without Police,” to be published in Stanford Law Review, Woods articulates a new legal framework for traffic enforcement, one that separates it from critical police functions, such as preventing and deterring crime, conducting criminal investigations and responding to emergencies.
If not the police, who then would enforce traffic laws? As Woods explains, jurisdictions would delegate most traffic enforcement to newly created traffic agencies. These public offices would operate independently from police departments and would hire their own traffic monitors to conduct and oversee traffic enforcement, including stops. Police officers would become involved in traffic stops only for serious violations that are a criminal offense or public threat.
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.
First Amendment Lawyers Fight in Supreme Court for Public Access to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Rulings Adam Klasfeld
Civil liberties groups joined forces with
George W. Bush’s former solicitor general in petitioning the Supreme Court for transparency over one of the few corners of the U.S. judiciary associated with covert operations: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and the appellate jurisdiction reviewing its denials, the FISCR.
“Public access to these opinions is critical to the legitimacy of the FISC and FISCR, to the legitimacy of the government’s surveillance activities, and to the democratic process,” Bush’s former solicitor general
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.