Recently, there was another incident in the United States where police brutality resulted in deaths.
On January 7, in Memphis, Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old FedEx employee and an African-American man, was stopped by police on suspicion of "reckless driving" on his way home. During the dispute, armed clashes ensued, and three days later, on January 10, Thiel Nichols died in hospital.
According to the video released on the 27th, the police subjected Thiel Nichols to very cruel abuse: pepper spray, electric shock, brutal beating.
The five black officers involved in the Memphis Police Department, Tadarius Bean, Demetrius Hali, Emmett Martin, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith, were fired after an internal department investigation. Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy announced that the men would face "second-degree murder, aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, dereliction of duty and oppression" and could face up to 60 years in prison on murder charges.
The police brutality sparked massive protests in Memphis and many U.S. cities, including New York.
This is not the first time that American police have turned a traffic accident into a fatal case. Deaths like Nichols' are all too common, especially for black people.
So, why are traffic stops so dangerous for black Americans?
01
Traffic stopping, why is it so dangerous?
Black Americans already know — whether from personal experience or news events — that in the United States, if they "meet the police," especially traffic stops, it is probably not a good thing, even if they are not fatal, they are in trouble.
Let's take a look at a few simple examples:
On April 11, 2021, Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, was shot and killed by police officer Kimberly Porter in a traffic stop and attempted arrest warrant at the center of Brooklyn, Minnesota, USA.
On June 12, 2020, 27-year-old African-American Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed by Atlanta Police Department (APD) Officer Garrett Rolf.
On July 13, 2015, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African American woman, was found hanged in a prison in Waller County, Texas, three days after she was arrested during a traffic stop. Her death was ruled suicide.
All of these once-sensational cases not only taught black civilians in the United States to fear traffic stops, as University of Arizona law professor Jordan Blair Woods wrote in the Michigan Law Review, but also made police view traffic stops as dangerous events, not just for those who stopped them, but also for themselves and their colleagues.
"The Police Academy regularly shows cadets videos of the most extreme cases of violence against police during routine traffic inspections to highlight how ordinary police work can quickly turn fatal if they are complacent or hesitant to use force at the scene," Woods wrote. ”
02
Always black drivers who get hurt?
This training obscures the fact that police officers are rarely the injured party in traffic stops.
In Woods' analysis of Florida traffic stop data from 2005 to 2014, the professor found that the probability of a police officer dying in a traffic stop was 1 in 650,000 and the probability of serious injury was 1 in 361111.
Overall, in more than 98% of traffic stops, no officers were injured, and if they were, they were minor.
Data from other states corroborate Woods' findings. In the book "Suspicious Citizen: What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race," Frank Baumgartner, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina, and Derek B. Smith, a professor of government at the University of Texas, and a professor of government at the University of Texas. A. Epp and Kelsey Schob, a professor of political science at the University of South Carolina, found that in North Carolina, "police encountered about 24,000 violent incidents, that is, just over one out of every 1,000 interceptions." The authors found that when someone is injured in a traffic stop, it is usually the person who is being stopped.
And an injured person like Nichols is unlikely to survive a routine police stop. A 2019 study by Shay Streetert (now a professor of American political science at the University of Michigan) found that in 2015, about 11 percent of police homicides in the United States occurred on traffic and sidewalks.
Traffic stops are even more deadly for blacks. This assertion also comes from data. The data shows that they are stopped more often than whites. In some places, even a lot more than whites. The database of the Stanford Open Policing Project found that in St. Paulo, black drivers were a little more than three times more likely to be stopped than white drivers, and in San Jose, California, black drivers were more than six times more likely to be stopped than whites.
Theoretically, drivers of all races should have about the same probability of being stopped by traffic, after all, anyone can drive recklessly. But some researchers believe the problem is related to police bias, both conscious and unconscious, that blacks are inherently more dangerous than whites.
03
Why exactly is the traffic interception in the United States?
What exactly is the purpose of the police traffic stop?
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Dartmouth College, led by Baumgartner, wrote in a 2017 paper that in many places, traffic control points serve two purposes: to deter violations and to provide police officers with the opportunity to investigate past or potential crimes.
In many ways, the system is akin to stop-and-go searches, one of the most commonly used practices in New York City to detect crime through street searches.
As Baumgartner writes, "Police officers are trained to use traffic stations as general law enforcement strategies aimed at reducing violent crime or drug trafficking." When police serve these broader targets, they are conducting investigative intercepts, and most of the time these stops are not related to traffic safety, but to those who look suspicious. ”
It's impossible to know—at least based on the information available so far—whether the officer who stopped Nichols did so because they found him suspicious. However, they are known to be part of the SCORPION Unit of Memphis, an acronym for Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighnorhoods, which means "street crime crackdown to restore peace to the community."
If black drivers are seen as more suspicious and police officers are trained to generally consider traffic stops dangerous, this creates a serious problem. When a black driver is stopped, the negotiation is more likely to begin with a police officer, who also takes more defensive measures.
This led to the kind of rapid escalation seen in the Nichols case, in which the police ended the interception with violence. Some officers like to start with violence, perhaps out of fear, as happened in the George Floyd case. For example, body camera footage released during Derek Chauvin's trial shows a police officer pulling out his weapon shortly after approaching Floyd's vehicle and yelling at him "now fucking hands up."
These tactics, along with fear and prejudice, work together to push black drivers into deadly and dangerous situations. Representatives of law enforcement argue that traffic stops are necessary — "it's a very valuable tool for us to find evidence of drugs and other crimes," Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas State Police Association, told the Pew Charitable Trust that in 2020 (though such findings were very rare), about 4 percent of stops in 2015 in the United States ended up triggering a search or arrest, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Some activists and elected officials have questioned whether the use of traffic stops to combat other crimes is worth it, given the risks traffic stops pose to drivers — especially black drivers — and the small number of arrests.
In 2021, the city of Berkeley, California, approved a plan to prohibit police from making traffic stops for non-safety-related violations; Auckland has a similar policy. Other places, including Montgomery County, Maryland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, are also considering such measures. Washington, D.C., in 2019 stripped the police department of some of its authority to regulate traffic laws, authorizing traffic departments to enforce the law. The New York State Attorney General has advised New York City to make similar changes, and in 2022, NYC police announced they would no longer use traffic stops for random checks to make public arrests.
Of course, the long-term effects of these measures remain to be seen.