A sharp decline in police traffic stops has compromised road safety

In an exhaustive report that examines traffic stop data from law enforcement agencies in a number of U.S. cities, The New York Times has found that after police traffic stops declined during the pandemic, enforcement now remains lax even though traffic volumes have since rebounded.

And the lax policing has a “likely connection” to the rise in road fatalities, the story says.

The piece, “Traffic Enforcement Dwindled in the Pandemic. In Many Places, It Hasn’t Come Back,” suggests that the reluctance of some police departments to pull over suspicious or speeding drivers is a result of public criticism and protests after the 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer.

But the problem goes deeper than that. The report assesses a decline in enforcement practices dating back to the late 1990s and in particular to 2015, after the police shooting death the prior year of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. The paper quotes Jeff Michael, a former longtime official at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who now studies road safety at Johns Hopkins University. He says, “The decline in traffic enforcement predates Ferguson by probably 10 years or more — that’s an important thing. But Ferguson certainly had an effect. That’s without a doubt. Ferguson, and everything after.”

Several charts with the report demonstrate a declining number of traffic stops in many cities across the country. “By the end of 2023, the police in Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they did pre-pandemic. In other police departments that don’t publicly track stops, like in Seattle and New York, the citations given during stops dropped off, too. The downturn appears even among some state agencies that monitor road safety on highways, like the Texas Highway Patrol and Connecticut State Police.”

In Seattle, for example, the number of traffic citations fell 83% from 2019 to 2023. In Nashville, traffic stops fell 91% in 2015-23. Meanwhile, Memphis led the list of increased traffic deaths, a number that has risen 74% between 2019 and 2022.

Citing the pandemic, the protests over how officers conduct traffic stops, and the issues of short-staffing in police departments, some agencies changed policies to address this kind of policing. In Los Angeles, for example, the story says, the police department responded by requiring officers to record their rationale for pretextual stops — when officers use a minor violation as an opening to search for more serious crimes. Philadelphia enacted a law limiting stops for reasons like a broken taillight.

Police actions are also intertwined with road safety strategies. In Los Angeles last year, car crashes killed more people than homicides — more than half of them pedestrians. The authors of the Times report, Ben Blatt and Emily Badger, quote the grandmother of three young-adult grandsons “whom she prays for daily. ’I pray they will not get involved in any officer entanglement. I pray that no gang member will attack them,’ she said. ’I pray that nobody runs a red light.’”

The complete story, in far more detail and with many illuminating interviews, can be found here. A subscription may be required.