Intended consequences
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o.j. started it
St. Louis police stopped enforcing traffic laws, and you’ll never guess what happened next.
… In response to the 2017 Smith riots and the 2020 Floyd riots, St. Louis police began to pull back on traffic enforcement. And as it became clear police would no longer chase offending vehicles, drivers began to flee from law enforcement when signaled instead of pulling over.
The results of the traffic enforcement pullback have been stark. In 2009, St. Louis police made 85,000 traffic stops, issued 35,000 tickets, and made 3,400 traffic arrests. Now those numbers have almost all been cut in half.
In 2021, St. Louis police made just 45,000 traffic stops, issued fewer than 18,000 tickets, and made just 1,300 arrests.
And this would all be fine, except that as traffic stops were cut in half, the number of traffic deaths doubled.
In 2009, there were about 40 traffic deaths compared to 81 in 2021. It turns out that when you stop enforcing traffic laws, people drive more dangerously, and more people die. And that isn’t the only harm.
“As a general rule, the public rightly wants to see laws on the books enforced, because if they’re not enforced, that generates the perception that you can commit crime with impunity,” University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
But individual woke cities aren’t the only places where this new enlightened approach to crime is being adopted; it’s entire states too, with, surprisingly, the same result:
Washington police say drivers aren't stopping for them
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — The Washington State Patrol says drivers are increasingly refusing to stop for troopers - and other law enforcement agencies also say this is becoming a common occurrence.
The Northwest News Network reports that from January 1 to May 17 of this year, the agency logged 934 failure-to-yield incidents. While the patrol didn’t track this in the past, veteran troopers say there’s been a dramatic uptick in drivers fleeing traffic stops.
“Something’s changed. People are not stopping right now,” said Sgt. Darren Wright, a WSP spokesperson with 31 years on the job. “It’s happening three to five times a shift on some nights and then a couple times a week on day shift.”
Local police departments are also seeing this behavior. The Puyallup Police Department logged 148 instances of drivers fleeing from officers from July 26, 2021 to May 18, 2022.
Asked if that represents a significant increase, Chief Scott Engle wrote in an email, “I could 1,000,000% say this is completely absolutely emphatically totally unusual.”
In Lakewood, another small city in Pierce County, Chief Mike Zaro said drivers are refusing to stop for his officers on average once a day.
“A lot of times they’re stolen cars; sometimes we don’t know what the deal is,” Zaro said.
Steve Strachan, the executive director of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, and others in law enforcement connect the increase in failures-to-yield to passage last year of House Bill 1054, a sweeping police tactics law that, among other things, barred high-speed pursuits except in very limited circumstances.
…. Under the new law, police officers can’t give chase unless there’s reasonable suspicion to believe the driver is impaired or the higher standard of probable cause to believe they’re an escaped felon or have committed a violent crime or a sex crime.
Even then there are restrictions on when officers can pursue. Officers must balance whether the person poses an “imminent threat” and whether the safety risks of the person getting away outweigh the danger of engaging in a high-speed chase.
This year both the Washington House and Senate passed a bill with bipartisan votes that would have amended the new pursuit law in response to concerns from police that it was too restrictive. But a final version of the measure died in the state Senate. Advocates for police reform opposed the change.
“Cars, you say? What about the poor, who can’t afford cars? Aren’t they entitled to walk, too?
The Chicago Police Department has unveiled a new policy prohibiting its officers from chasing people on foot simply because they run away, or because they have committed minor offenses.
The policy, which was introduced Tuesday, also encourages cops to “consider alternatives” to pursuing someone who “is visibly armed with a firearm.”
Under the policy, officers may give chase if they believe a person is committing or is about to commit a felony, a Class A misdemeanor such as domestic battery, or a serious traffic offense that could risk injuring others, such as drunken driving or street racing.
Perhaps most significantly, the new policy makes clear that the days of officers giving chase just because someone tries to get away from them are over.
“People may avoid contact with a member for many reasons other than involvement in criminal activity,” the policy states.
Running away from “unwanted contact” makes perfect sense in a social context: encountering an interminable bore or liberal (but then, I repeat myself) at a cocktail party, for instance, but fleeing a police officer should, in a normal world, raise suspicions. In a normal world.
