Cities scaled back traffic stops, and road deaths soared

In the early days of the pandemic in 2020, traffic stops by police plummeted around the country, as fewer cars were on the road and as agencies instructed officers to avoid nonessential contact with the public.

But in the years that followed, a distinct pattern formed in many cities: The cars came back in full force, but the traffic enforcement didn’t.

By the end of 2023, police in Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they did prepandemic. In other police departments that don’t publicly track stops, like Seattle’s and New York’s, 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 the Connecticut State Police.

This decline, seen in an analysis of local law enforcement data, accelerated a shift that began in many places before the pandemic, suggesting that police have pulled back from a part of their job that has drawn especially sharp criticism. To many communities, traffic stops have led to racial discrimination, burdensome fines and deadly encounters — not road safety.

But the retreat of law enforcement from American roadways has also occurred against the backdrop of a rise in road fatalities.

It’s hard to draw a straight line from the decline of enforcement to the rise of road deaths, but their likely connection has unsettled researchers, safety advocates and police officials.

“I cannot ignore that,” said Charles T. Brown, whose firm Equitable Cities has worked with communities on police reform and road safety. “That does not mean, however, that the traditional form of enforcement is necessary to reverse that trend.”

If traffic stops and road fatalities were falling in tandem — because roads were becoming safer overall, or because officers were giving fewer equipment citations while pursuing dangerous drivers instead — that would be a different scenario.

Today’s picture suggests, rather, that as police have responded to the pandemic and cries for reform after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, they have also withdrawn from their role pulling over speeding cars and reckless drivers.

“When I talk to police, I say, ‘Fine, don’t focus on the paperwork issues,’” like giving tickets for expired registrations, said Ken Barone, who manages the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project. “But that should free you up to have more time to focus on the things that are killing people. And I’m not seeing that.”

The downward pressure on traffic enforcement has come from every direction — the public and police, reformers and critics of reform.

“There is a kind of right narrative and a left narrative, and they actually converge, which is that there’s just less political support for traffic enforcement,” said Greg Shill, a law professor at the University of Iowa. “You can see that as: ‘Cops need to get home safe, and they’re afraid of being wrongly labeled as abusive or racist.’ Or you can see it as: ‘Civilians have asserted more control over police departments.’”

This dynamic has roots well before the pandemic.

The share of Americans who say they have been pulled over has fallen since at least the late 1990s in a periodic federal survey tracking contacts between police and the public. That share has dropped in particular since 2015, after the police shooting death the prior year of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

“The decline in traffic enforcement predates Ferguson by probably 10 years or more — that’s an important thing,” said Jeff Michael, who studies road safety at Johns Hopkins University. “But Ferguson certainly had an effect. That’s without a doubt. Ferguson, and everything after.”

That downturn comes from two sources — orders from on high and individual officers on the street — that can be hard to untangle.

First, some police departments shifted guidance after Ferguson, directing officers to pursue fewer nonmoving violations. Racial disparities are widest among drivers stopped for those reasons.

The second force is more diffuse, as officers retreat from interactions with the public that are essentially discretionary.

“Why subject yourself to potential discipline or problems?” said Tom Saggau, spokesperson for the Los Angeles Police Protective League union. “Why subject yourself to the inherent danger of engaging? Many times, officers are questioning: ‘Why am I even doing this?’”

These decisions by officers and police leaders intensified three months into the pandemic, when Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis officer. Protesters rallied against discrimination and the deadly use of force. A 2021 New York Times investigation found that American police officers in five years had killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were neither wielding weapons nor under pursuit for a violent crime.

In Los Angeles, 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.

The pandemic, the protests and calls to cut police funding also contributed to a police staffing shortage that became acute in larger cities. And when police departments are short-staffed, they cull specialty units like the traffic division.

In the years preceding the pandemic in Burlington, Vermont, traffic stops and serious crashes were declining together. That’s because while police scaled back minor stops and vehicle searches, the city also redesigned speed humps and crosswalks, said the city’s police chief, Jon Murad.

“I believe there’s an elastic bottom to that, at which point things snapped back,” he said. And indeed during the pandemic, serious crashes rose again. “Absent enforcement, the engineering methods don’t do the job by themselves.”

Vision Zero programs, embraced by many U.S. cities to reduce road fatalities, have tried to pair police enforcement with redesigned roads and public education campaigns.

In New York, Vision Zero helped reduce road injury rates in the years leading up the pandemic. But during the pandemic, New York lost those gains, according to a study tracking injuries in Medicaid claims data. One major difference? Police enforcement plummeted, the researchers point out.

The question before communities today is in part whether enforcement can return, stripped of the harms that have long been a part of it.

In a country with about 18,000 local police agencies — where the department culture and rate of stops vary widely — each will need an answer.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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