A Precinct House, a String of Deaths - and How to Stop Traffic Stops from Gambling with People's Lives

One day in mid-June, having taken a rare week off work, I was walking my son to school when we spotted two curled-up $20 bills on the sidewalk. It was the kind of sum that, to many people in our area, might be entirely inconsequential. But, to, say, a struggling food delivery cyclist or cleaner, those two bills might, I thought, represent a substantial loss. With that thought in mind and being temperamentally unsuited to pocketing something I hadn’t earned, I headed after I’d dropped the Invisible Visible Boy at school to report the cash as lost property at the New York Police Department’s 76th Precinct House.

Unlikely site for an epiphany: the NYPD's 76th precinct house.

As I sat waiting for someone to talk to me about my discovery, however, I noticed something significant about the layout of the area around the station house’s main entrance. Behind the public counter, by the door – in a position where they would be the last thing many officers would see before heading out on patrol – stood three memorials to officers from the precinct who’d died in the line of duty. Among them was Maitland Mercer, a patrolman shot dead in 1965 while off duty and trying to arrest a suspect.

The plaques excited mixed emotions in me. Each of the deaths – although each occurred decades apart – must have shocked and appalled the dead men’s fellow officers and devastated their families. I was horrified by the killing of two New York police officers just before Christmas. But the memorials were also, it seemed to me, manifestations of a culture around US law enforcement that celebrates the profession’s dangers and focuses on violent confrontations, at the expense of a more collaborative philosophy. The near cult-like celebration of fallen police officers encourages, I suspect, the dangerous idea that virtuous officers are engaged in a Manichean struggle against dark forces every time they leave the precinct house.

I quickly moved on to worrying about something else. If I felt so uneasy about the culture surrounding US policing, it occurred to me, wasn’t it strange that I instinctively wanted police officers to be tougher on traffic violations? It’s a striking feature of the many of the highest-profile killings of black people by police that the incidents in question start with traffic stops. The killing in April of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, by a police officer followed a stop for a broken brake light. Samuel DuBose died on July 19 in Cincinnati after being stopped by a University of Cincinnati police officer who thought (wrongly, given the local law) he was missing a vehicle licence plate. Sandra Bland, who was found dead in a Texas jail cell on July 13, had been stopped three days earlier for not using her indicators to pull her car over as a police officer followed her.

 

NYPD cruisers in midtown: a force for road safety?

I’ve had regular cause since that moment in the 76th precinct house to ask myself: is it possible to reconcile an effort to tighten up traffic policing on the US’s roads with a desire to cut the dreadful annual toll of deaths at the hands of police officers?

The starting point in the search for an answer is to unpick what’s actually going on in the traffic stops that end in an officer’s standing over some black person’s prone body – which is that few of them seem to involve serious safety violations. It’s important that vehicles have working brake lights, that drivers use their indicators and that vehicles bear appropriate licence plates. But it’s significant, it seems to me, that neither Sandra Bland nor Samuel DuBose nor Walter Scott was stopped, say, for speeding or using a mobile phone while driving or refusing to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk – all offences that lead to thousands of deaths annually in the US.

These traffic stops seem, instead, to have had far more in common with the kind of policing-as-harassment tactics that are familiar in many parts of the world but for which the US has a particular predilection. The broken tail-light, the apparently missing licence plate, the momentary failure to signal aren’t of much interest to the officer. The point – as it was with the New York Police Department’s now-abandoned Stop and Frisk policy of searching people on the flimsiest of pretexts – seems far more to have been to exert control.

The motivation often appears to be for officers to mark their territory and stamp their authority on anyone who seems suspicious to them – a group that seems inevitably disproportionately to include African-Americans. The simplest act of defiance – such as Sandra Bland’s continuing to smoke a cigarette while a police officer addressed her – seems in such a context to be an act of infuriating insolence that demands a response.

 

These NYPD officers may be fine, upstanding people -
but it's easier to understand the system where they work
if one understands it's racist.

It’s easier to understand why such a high proportion of the New York Police Department’s traffic stops are for the apparently minor offence of having excessively tinted windows when one sees traffic stops as part of a racist system. It’s a modification that officers associate with the desire of members of minority groups to hide from onlookers, especially the police. It’s a relatively minor safety issue but a significant affront to police officers who experience traffic policing as a kind of primal marking of their territory.

Still more reprehensibly, it’s clear that many municipalities – notably Ferguson, Missouri, where the killing a year ago of Michael Brown, a young black man, by a white police officer started the current agitation over policing violence – use traffic stops as an important source of revenue. The US justice department’s report on the municipality in March recorded pressure from the town authorities on the police to ramp up ticketing to raise money for the budget. It also noted that 85 per cent of vehicle stops in Ferguson were of black people, although they made up only 67 per cent of the population.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, the US writer criticises the arbitrary, racist thinking behind such policing in Between the World and Me, his superb new book about growing up as an African-American man. The book talks at length about how Prince Jones, a black college friend of Coates’, was killed by police in an apparently unjustified traffic stop in Virginia in 2000.

“You know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body,” Coates writes to his 15-year-old son. “It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding… The destroyers will rarely be held accountable.”

Yet, while it’s impossible to defend contemporary traffic policing in the US, I’m also deeply resistant to the idea – which seems to be gaining ground amid the discrediting of current behaviour – that traffic policing is a trivial matter that could reasonably be put aside as part of the police’s responsibilities. A better-focused system of traffic policing could surely improve on the US’s current dismal record on road safety. In 2013, the most recent year for which data are available, 32,719 people died on the US’s roads. The US’s minorities – who disproportionately live in areas poorly served with crosswalks and public transport – must suffer a disproportionate share of these deaths too.

Nuneham Courtenay: a rural idyll, protected by speed camera

As a result, I’ve found my mind turning increasingly to the village of Nuneham Courtenay,in Oxfordshire, in England, which I visited in 2011. I visited the village the day after residents achieved their aim of having reactivated a speed camera that had significantly slowed traffic on the 30mph road that divides the village. The camera had been deactivated as part of a populist backlash against cameras under the coalition government after the UK’s 2010 general election. Villagers had looked on in horror as, without the threat of a speeding fine, drivers increasingly ignored signs telling them to slow down from the 70mph speed limit on the roads outside to the far slower speed required when passing right by villagers’ front doors.

It’s an obvious virtue of mechanising the process of policing bad driving that the policing is no longer subject to arbitrary considerations such as whether policing staffing is down because of school holidays. It’s also helpful that cameras are generally places where there’s general agreement they’re serving a real safety, not fund-raising purpose. In the UK, the main criterion has been that four people should have been killed or seriously injured at a site in the past four years. It’s also, however, a great virtue of cameras that they won’t display racist bias. Policing should be far more closely linked to drivers’ behaviour and far less linked to their race.

 

Officers from the NYPD's 28th precinct demonstrate
how seriously they take road safety, by parking blocking
a bike lane in Harlem

A nationwide programme of speed and red light camera installation across the US could, if wisely implemented, be part of a wholesale rethinking of policing in the area. It’s clear that there are some violations – such as the use of phones while driving – that it will always be hard to hand over to cameras. But it would be transformative, as I’ve argued before, to start linking the promotion prospects of officers charged with traffic policing to the number of crashes, injuries and deaths on their roads, rather than to the number of tickets issued. Such a policy would immediately, I’d guess, eliminate many NYPD precincts’ enthusiasm for ticketing cyclists – a form of harassment that’s far less grave than that against black people and other minorities but stems, I think, from a similar desire to exert control over a group seen as troublesome outsiders.

Not that I sensed any mood for revolutionary change at the 76th precinct. Before I could even finish my explanation about finding the money, an officer interrupted, shouting across the room, to demand what identification I’d found with the money. None, I replied.

“We will never find the owner of that money,” the officer replied, sending me burdened with the Protestant guilt of an unearned $40, back into the street.

His last words rang in my ears as I trudged back towards the apartment.

“Sometimes it’s just your lucky day,” he said.

It wasn’t, a voice in my head objected, a lucky day for the person who’d lost $40 on the way to the subway, though, was it?

The idea fed into concerns far more significant than a mere $40. There is no element of luck attached to whether a driver gets a speeding ticket in Nuneham Courtenay. Luck plays far too large an element both in whether US police forces catch dangerous traffic violations – and in whether people stopped by US traffic patrols survive the encounter. It’s an obscene gambling with lives that can be and should be stopped.

Citibikes, drivers - and the science of moral development

When I first started cycling to work down W54th street in Manhattan, I used to find it puzzling how cars would suddenly come to a complete, but brief, halt half way between 7^th and 6^th avenues. Then, after a while, I realised what was going on. There was a stop sign intended to protect a crosswalk on the new 6½ Avenue pedestrian path half-way along the block. Cars would carefully come to a complete - but milliseconds long – halt at the sign, to fulfill the legal requirements.

But I quickly recognised a second phenomenon. When I approached the crosswalk, I would stop if I saw pedestrians waiting to cross and let them go.  Most motorists would do the brief halt and drive on regardless, forcing the pedestrians to wait until a break in traffic.

The crosswalk came to symbolise for me the way that many drivers in cities worldwide end up reacting to road rules. They follow what they understand to be the letter of certain laws – in this instance, that cars must stop fully at a stop sign in New York City. But they ignore the wider spirit – that one should not barge past pedestrians trying to cross the road at a designated crossing point. The road environment for pedestrians trying to use 6½ Avenue is little safer as a result of the drivers’ brief stop at the stop sign than if they simply blew through. The sign plays next-to-no role in reducing the horrific annual death toll on New York City’s roads.

 

Five New York Police Department cruisers on W55th Street.
A heroic guess: in none of these vehicles is an officer pondering
how to push road users towards Kohlberg's higher stages
of moral development.

The behaviour puts me in mind of the famous work on moral development by Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist who classified people’s moral development from the earliest stage – when they merely sought to avoid punishment – to the highest – when they behaved according to an established set of ethical principles. The drivers’ behaviour around the stop sign demonstrates the kind of moral reasoning that, in other fields, one might associate with a toddler seeking to be naughty but get away with it.

The question is how a city – any city, but the most pressing examples for me at present come from New York – can become a place where people interact according to the most advanced stages of moral development. Cities should be striving towards roads where users treat each other out of genuine concern and insight into the other person’s interests.

 

A Citibike stand, by the Brooklyn Waterfront, complete
with neophyte cyclists. Let's hope they're as keen
when they've completed the ride as before

The subject has been particularly on my mind this week because of the launch of New York’s Citibike bike-sharing scheme. It’s clear – from my own observations and from Dmitry Gudkov’s excellent stories and pictures of riders – that many new riders are using bikes for transport for the first time in New York City. It would be a tragedy if, after such a positive start, those new cyclists were to find themselves put off by the near-misses and abuse that other cyclists all too often experience.

The answer, it seems to me, lies in a shift in policing thinking intended, as good parenting should, to push road users gradually towards more considerate use of the road. It is likely unfortunately to prove a long, slow process.

I encountered evidence of the scale of the challenge on my way to work on Friday, as I made my way down E55th street. A car started pulling out into the bike lane as I approached, trying to push into a traffic jam, despite my repeated shouts that he was pulling into my path. When I finally, despite his continued efforts to block me, squeezed past, he shouted after me, sanctimoniously, “Share the road!”

There’s a simple problem underlying these complex issues, however. The NYPD, like probably quite a few police forces worldwide, doesn’t seem to have much of an idea what it’s trying to achieve with its road policing. That’s self-evident looking at most precincts’ traffic ticket statistics. Ticketing focuses heavily on issues like excessively tinted windows that are easy to prove, rather than on offences such as speeding or distracted driving where the behaviour is harder to prove but creates far more danger.

Only basic laziness – and the need to meet some arbitrary monthly target for ticketing – can explain incidents such as the one in April where several policemen - from a force, remember, that claims to have too few resources to investigate crashes properly - stationed themselves late at night on part of the Hudson River Greenway and ticketed and fined cyclists “for their own safety” for the purely technical offence of being in a New York City park (rather than on the far more dangerous roads) after the parks’ official 1am closing time. This and other similar incidents – the truck policing unit that ticketed more cyclists than trucks, for example – suggests the pressure on NYPD traffic cops is to meet quotas for ticket issuing, rather than to make the streets safer.

If such an approach is at work, it would chime with the evidence that’s emerged from the civil case against the NYPD over “stop and frisk” – the NYPD’s insistence on stopping young men to search them for weapons on even the most flimsy evidence. That trial has produced evidence that officers were told to meet targets for monthly stops, rather actually arresting criminals for serious offences. The force is facing legal action because many officers seem to have assumed – and in some cases to have been explicitly told – that the goal was to harass young black and Latino men.

 

Traffic infringements abound on W54th street.
A simple contribution to the police benevolent fund,
however, and no driver need worry.

On traffic policing, meanwhile, another regular sign of attitudes is the proliferation on cars of signs showing support for one or other police organisation or benevolent organisation. The signs clearly reflect an attitude that a traffic ticket is a piece of random bad luck to be made go away, rather than a punishment for a serious offence that could kill or maim another human being. That these signs continue to be so popular suggests they are effective at deterring trouble – and that many police officers agree on road offences’ importance.

It would surely make far more sense for senior police officers’ pay or promotion prospects to depend on measures of desirable outcomes on the roads. Would a precinct commander who knew his pay depended on a 20 per cent fall in road deaths and serious injuries send officers to harass cyclists using an important cycle path simply because it was too late at night? Would he allow his officers to hand out as many or more fines for excessively tinted windows in a month as for the widespread – and deadly – offence of speeding? It’s instead far more likely, I’d suggest, that officers would start to think seriously about policing the crimes that kill and injure large numbers of people every year. It should also help to stop the nonsense that drivers effectively buy immunity from prosecution via donations to police benevolent associations.

I can’t pretend, of course, that such a change would immediately turn every city road user everywhere into a practitioner of the highest, level six stage of moral development under Kohlberg’s principles. Those who have reached level six apply universal moral principles to their interactions with others, seeking to be entirely fair. Most UK police forces concentrate more on the deadliest offences – even if I disagree with many of their attitudes – and drivers in London remain often aggressive and inconsiderate.

But a clearly-signalled change of strategy would surely indicate to drivers that the outcomes of their behaviour – the numbers of pedestrians mowed down in crosswalks, for example – matter. It would shift drivers’ thinking about road policing away from a focus on the grubby transaction – how do I get this officer to ignore my speeding? – towards something a little more positive. What happens if I speed here, hit someone and get treated as other killers would?

The Manhattan Bridge: it is physically impossible, in good
weather, to bowl down the bike lane unobstructed
without a smile on one's face

I recognise such a change remains, sadly, far off in New York, although it may be closer – or may even have arrived – elsewhere.

The scene I encountered in the early hours of Saturday as I rode home makes me wish that were not so.

I had to work late and took a convoluted route home, through Times Square, the Broadway Bike Lane and the east side bike path to the Manhattan Bridge. As I started my climb onto the bridge around 1.30am, I encountered a young couple whizzing the other way on Citibikes, wearing the broad grin that pretty much anyone who’s ever barrelled down that lane unobstructed on a warm summer’s night must have done. A week before, they probably weren’t New York City cyclists. I can only now imagine they’re warmly commending the experience to their friends. It would be sad if a nasty grouch such as E55th street man were to change their minds – and an unspeakable tragedy if something still worse were to befall them.