Reflections on Traffic Stops

   According to a NYTimes investigation, in the last 5 years, American police  conducted at least 100,000 million traffic stops. That's 50,000 per day according to Stanford. They are the most common interaction between tax paying citizens and those who are payed to "serve and protect." And while the chances of an officer being killed during such encounters are 1 in 3.6 million (60 officers in the last 5 years), police have killed 400 unarmed individuals (1 per week.) Disproportionately, those individuals are Black.  

   Police training and culture instills a paramilitary "us against them"/ "occupied territory" mentality and too often, African Americans are perceived by a largely white police force (30% higher than the population that they patrol in hundreds of departments) as criminalized and them. The racial disparities in traffic stops and subsequent search and seizure expose dangerous levels of anti-Black racism in policing. 

   In too many municipalities, traffic stop revenue is used to bolster if not out right fund jurisdictions and it's done disproportionately on the backs of African Americans. Some of these municipalities receive federal grants that encourage and enable the same traffic stops that lead to racial inequity.    

   What can be done to dramatically minimize these interactions?  

   While Philadelphia became the first major city to pass legislation that was signed into law on Nov 5th that "will prevent police from stopping drivers for “secondary” stops, which includes tinted windows, broken tail lights, and other minor obstructions", the data that was used to expose the racial inequity exists because Philadelphia is under a federal consent decree that mandates collection and publication of such.   

   Our purpose is to ultimately gather traffic stop info from the 23 states and the District of Columbia that legally mandate it, provide standardized demographic statistical analysis combined with visualization via GIS mapping for the appropriate jurisdictions to enable community members, activists, city council members, progressive mayors and district attorneys with the tools that they need to provide the impetus to craft their own municipality's "Driving Equality Act."  

   Adoption of our product would enable municipalities to implement laws that would dramatically reduce associated racial disparities.       

   We are in the process of exploring the various states of data standardization and accessibility from the 23 sates and Washington DC that mandate collection of traffic stop data and how best to standardize the data and incorporate it into a visualization via GIS mapping applications. We are also evaluating potential vendors for data analysis, GIS mapping, data storage, servers, web site, applications, related technology versus how much will be done in house before launching a pilot project.