theguardian | It is no surprise that the pursuit and deadly beating of Tyre Nichols was set in motion by a police traffic stop.
Despite repeated criticism of this practice, and the widespread availability of body-cam and cellphone footage, the number of fatalities from such encounters shows no sign of declining.
Between 2017 and November 2022, 730 people were killed by police during these incidents. More than once a week during that time, someone not being pursued or investigated for a violent crime met their death after a traffic stop. An alarming number were stopped on the pretext of any one of a hundred or more petty traffic code violations.
How did police achieve the power, and impunity, to stop motorists seemingly at will?
Beginning in the 1920s, police departments experienced rapid growth because the mass uptake of car ownership called for adequate traffic enforcement. Until then, uniformed officers on wheels had mostly been chasing gangsters and robbers. Would they have the legal right to stop otherwise law-abiding motorists driving in their own private vehicles? Even without a warrant? Yes, the courts decided, because the cars were being operated on public roads.
As Sarah Seo has shown, over the ensuing decades, judges granted more and more powers to the police to stop and search vehicles. In particular, they were given the authority to do so on the mere pretext of suspecting criminal activity – in what is now known as a pretextual traffic stop. But what constitutes a “reasonable” pretext is still a legal gray area. The fourth amendment is supposed to protect us against searches and seizures that are “unreasonable”. The problem is that when fourth amendment cases are brought against police, courts and juries routinely defer to the officer’s testimony.
This judicial tilt in favor of discretionary authority inevitably led to abridgments of civil liberties, and worse.
That it would lead to racial profiling was foreordained. The ability to hit the road is often seen as an American birthright, manifest in the freedom to travel from coast to coast, unrestricted and unsurveilled. Yet the right to enjoy this liberty has never been enjoyed evenly, because of the restrictions historically placed on the movement of Black (and, in many regions, brown) people by vigilantes, police and other government agents.
Today’s warrantless traffic stops are part of the lineage of the many efforts to limit the access of people of color to the heavily mythologized freedom of the open road. So, too, the well-known perils of “driving while Black” or brown are amplified by the paramilitary technology embedded in today’s police cars. Such features include drone-equipped trunks, bumper-mounted GPS dart guns, automatic license plate readers, voice diction technology, facial and biometric recognition, thermal imaging, augmented reality eyewear, smart holsters, ShotSpotter gunfire detectors, and advanced computers and software that allow instant access to government and law enforcement databases. “Hot spot” policing requires hi-tech cars to move in formation, through targeted urban neighborhoods. In 1960, James Baldwin compared an officer “moving through Harlem” to “an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country”. Today’s saturation patrols, like Scorpion, the Memphis unit that hunted down Nichols, bear more of a resemblance to counter-insurgency missions by special operations forces.
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