Broken Tail Light Policing

We live in a fairly well-off suburb of Minneapolis. The crime rate is pretty low, though our house was broken into fourteen years ago and a worthless twenty-year-old stereo was stolen. Fixing the front door cost us 20 or 30 times more than value of the stolen property.

My wife recently went on a ride-along with a city police officer. The cop spent most of the time running license plates. He also spent a long time watching a gas station near the high school that's the hub for drug deals.

Unlike Ferguson, MO, our city doesn't depend on traffic citations to balance the budget. We've got one of the biggest shopping malls in the area, lots of nice houses on lakes and in wooded areas, and plenty of businesses, all of which provide a decent property tax base. That also means we have almost no poverty, which means we have a pretty small minority community: the city is 95% white, and blacks make up about 1.5%.

Yet on my wife's ride along three of the five drivers stopped were black.

There are no laws on the books specifically intended to target minorities. It was a winter night in Minnesota and there was no way to tell the race of drivers. Objectively, there was no attempt to target African Americans, but somehow blacks were stopped far more frequently relative to their population in the city and the state.

Cops here only stop cars for real violations. That includes moving violations, speeding, expired or missing plates, faulty equipment (missing mufflers, broken tail lights), erratic driving, and violations of driving restrictions (convicted drunk drivers have special plates so curfew violations can be identified).

Traffic stops don't target by race, they target by income.

The effect of this is that traffic stops here don't target by race, they target by income. Poor people are more likely to own older or cheaper cars, which means they're much more likely to have something go wrong with them and get stopped by the cops. Poor people are more likely to be strapped for license and plate renewal fees, and will be more tempted to risk stretching out the grace period.

But since African Americans are much more likely to be poor, they're much more likely to be stopped. Even if they're committing crimes at the same rate as whites, they'll get caught more often because they're stopped more often.

For example, one of the cars stopped was in violation of a law that prohibits tinted windows (it was dawdling at the drug-dealer gas station). The driver was black, and was cited for driving without a license. It turns out that the car was a former police cruiser (I'm guessing it was bought cheaply at auction in another state -- the driver was from Ohio).

A rich white person with a brand-new SUV driving with an expired driver's license will just never get caught.

It was a very quiet Friday night on my wife's ride-along, and there weren't any drunk or high drivers. But the cop said they get a lot of arrests for drug possession and drunk driving because they are stopped for some other minor equipment violation, like burned-out tail or brake lights.

There are plenty of rich whites who drive drunk, or high, or are holding. But unless there's some cause for them to be stopped, they'll never get caught. Traffic laws discriminate between rich and poor. And since income is closely linked to race, they discriminate between black and white.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the laws on our books. People with unsafe cars should be made to fix them. People should have current licenses and plates.

Laws that discriminate by income cause blacks to be stopped more frequently because they're poorer.

But the laws do two things that perpetuate the idea that African Americans are criminals. First, they preselect poorer minorities for closer scrutiny by police, which means that even if richer whites commit crimes at a higher rate, they're able to slip by unnoticed because of their wealth. This creates a perception that minorities are more criminal.

Second, these laws start the poor on a downward spiral. If you get stopped for a cracked wind shield and your license is expired -- because finances are tight or you just don't have time to get it renewed because you're working three minimum wage jobs 80 hours a week and can't afford to take time off to go to the DMV during the typical 7:30-4:30 M-F schedule they're open -- you can't drive anymore and they might even impound your car. And you get a $200-plus in fines, plus towing and storage fees at the impound lot. And you still don't have the time or money to renew your license.

Since ours is such a car-centric culture, now you can't get to work. You wind up coming late a lot because you have to bum a ride or have a bus ride that takes two hours one way, or pay a cab, stretching your finances even further. That means you can't pay the fine for driving without a license, so the city garnishes your pay check. You're not looking like a very reliable employee any more. When a layoff comes, you're the first to go.

This isn't just a problem for blacks, it's a problem for whites too. A lot of formerly middle-class white Americans got sucked down the poverty drain in Great Recession.

But the real difference between Ferguson and our city is the attitude of the cops. In Ferguson, the cops piled on one bogus citation after another. They had contests to see who could get the most violations in a single stop (I think 14 was the highest).

On my wife's ride-along the officer was a stickler for the law. He stopped one car without plates that had a yellow piece of paper taped to the inside of the back window, which at first glance looked like a temporary permit for a new car. But it wasn't a permit, it was just a piece of paper with lines drawn on it. The driver was black, and had just picked up her kids at a school event. It was her brother's car. The cop told her she couldn't drive it home, so she called the brother to figure out what to do. Only then did she find out that the plates were actually in the car.

Clearly, the brother was violating some law. But since he wasn't driving, and the plates were in the car, the cop felt he had nothing to charge her with. And he just let her go.

The cop could have been a hard-ass and issued a citation immediately, called a tow truck and cost this woman hundreds of dollars in fines and towing fees. He would have been justified, and no one would have been the wiser, because technically, that woman was in violation of the law. But he didn't.

Did he let her go because my wife was there? Because there were kids in the car? Because he was so meticulous about the law? Because he was a nice guy? Because his conscience had been raised by Ferguson? Because cops in suburban Minnesota are soft touches? I don't know.

But I do know that every citizen in Ferguson, and every other town that has been leeching off  poor and black Americans, deserves that same kind of consideration.