Why Have Cops Stopped Pulling People Over In A Crime Wave?
A disastrous experiment drives crime even higher in an already crime-plagued city
For decades, police reform activists have decried the injustice of “pretextual” traffic stops, in which officers pull over drivers for minor traffic infractions as a pretext for investigating them for more significant crimes. These stops, activists claim, are a form of racial profiling.
As far back as 1999, the ACLU put out a report entitled “Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on Our Nation’s Highway,” likely in response to a Supreme Court ruling three years earlier that held that any traffic violation is a legitimate basis for a traffic stop. As an Illinois state senator, Barack Obama sponsored a bill to collect data on racial disparities in traffic stops. In 2015, after the anti-police riots in Ferguson, Missouri, The New York Times published a major investigation on racial disparities in traffic stops in Greensboro, North Carolina.
As a result of this advocacy, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and San Francisco have banned pretextual stops, while Los Angeles and the state of Virginia have sharply limited them.
But in Oakland, California, evidence suggests that reductions in traffic stops show mixed results on reducing racial disparities while dramatically increasing crime. From 2016 to the present, traffic stops have plummeted in Oakland by 80%. Meanwhile, crime has risen by 30%, according to a study by Timothy Gardner, an Oakland resident with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering.
The drop is not a function of staffing. In 2014, Oakland had about 100 fewer officers than today but was making about 5 times the number of stops.
The causes of crime are notoriously elusive. Traffic stops are only one of countless variables that impact crime rates, including police staffing, prosecution rates, drug addiction, prevalence of firearms, and myriad cultural and economic factors.
But traffic stops are particularly significant because they are the principal way that police initiate contact with civilians, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. They are thus the most common way for police officers to intercept criminal suspects proactively.
The reduction in traffic stops in Oakland is almost entirely comprised of discretionary traffic stops. Dispatch stops — stops that are initiated by a 911 call — have not fallen over the same period. Given the staggering number of 911 calls in Oakland, one might suspect that police officers are so busy making dispatch stops that they don’t have time to make non-dispatch stops.
But that’s not what the data indicate. Between July and September 2023, according to OPD’s numbers, the squad with the fewest non-dispatch stops (5) made only 68 dispatch stops — for each officer, about one dispatch stop every week-and-a-half. Clearly, this squad was not overwhelmed with stops related to 911 calls.
Indeed, in every month between October 2022 and September 2023 (the last month such data is available), OPD made fewer dispatch traffic stops than even their paltry number of non-dispatch stops.
“I cannot convey to you how mortifying those stats are to me,” a retired Oakland police officer told Public.
The predictable result of this deliberate suppression of policing has been a massive rise in crime. “It has contributed to a state of lawlessness where anything goes and police will do nothing,” Gardner told Public.
Gardner predicts that close to 300 additional car thefts occur in Oakland monthly as a result of the drop in traffic stops. The rise in this particular crime is noteworthy since stolen cars are routinely used to commit further crimes. A rise in car thefts thus tends to mean a rise in other categories of crime as well.
With crime spiraling out of control in Oakland and voters so frustrated they’re on the brink of recalling their far-left district attorney, why did anyone ever think reducing pretextual police stops was a good idea?
A Pacified Police Force
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