Cut pretextual stops, reduce racial bias by police

A markedly different approach to preventing racial bias and use of force in policing is being implemented to great effect in jurisdictions across the country, reported Inquest. Rather than trying to “fix” policing, this approach demonstrates that the surest way to prevent police violence is to eliminate the occasions to inflict it. Pretext stop policies move beyond failed reforms and take a new approach: Instead of trying to change the way individual officers think, why don’t we restrict their ability to act on their biases?

Pretext traffic stops are one of the most common and consequential ways police officers exercise discretion and act on racial bias. These stops—in which officers pull drivers over for low-level traffic violations, such as expired registration tags, often as an excuse to fish for evidence of unrelated crimes—overwhelmingly target people of color and are regularly escalated by police. According to the New York Times, from 2017 to 2021, police killed more than 400 unarmed civilians in these types of stops—a rate of more than a death a week.

According to findings by Pamambir Dhillon in the Berkeley Public Policy Journal pretext stop restrictions in San Francisco immediately led to large, statistically significant reductions in stops and searches for Black and Latino drivers in the city—all without generating changes in drug, gun, or contraband discoveries. Latino drivers saw a 68 percent reduction in weekly pretext stops immediately after policy implementation, while Black drivers saw a nearly 50 percent decrease. These large reductions reversed the previous trend, which was steady increases in pretext stops across all racial groups and held constant even after accounting for changes in crime rates, police staffing levels, and driving activity in the city.

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, at least sixteen cities across the country, including Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Seattle, have implemented comprehensive policies limiting a wide range of non‑safety‑related traffic stops, and Virginia was the first state to do so in 2021. As research continues to emerge, we see that targeting officer discretion can achieve what hundreds of millions of dollars spent on implicit bias training and body-worn cameras have been unable to. Moreover, empirical evidence demonstrates that you cannot meaningfully reform the scale of discriminatory policing—you can only reduce the scale of policing itself. Pretext stop policies are a key component to achieving this reduction, but not the only one: alternative response programs and civilian traffic enforcement are part of the same project, which seeks to replace police encounters rather than refine them.

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