Whitmire: Teach the Children Traffic Stops

The Austin Police Department’s Air 1 chopper today executed a loop around the Chronicle office, assisting officers with pursuit of a driver who sped off from a nearby stop.

The timing’s ironic: Minutes beforehand, I’d received an email from State Sen. John Whitmire’s office about efforts to improve state traffic stops.

Specifically, the email concerned the Houston senator’s new proposal that the state turn to educational methods to change how civilians interact with police officers during traffic stops. (Top of the syllabus: Don’t try to drive away.) During the upcoming legislative session, Whitmire will file a bill requiring schools to educate ninth graders on “how to interact with law enforcement” when they are stopped for a traffic violation or detained.

“There is no home team or visiting team,” he wrote, adding that he would hope to see increased training for peace officers as well. “We must all come together to develop the best strategies to improve relations and trust between law enforcement and they communities they serve.”

Expect preliminary discussion of the proposal next Tuesday when the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice meets up at the Capitol. On the docket: a review of law enforcement efforts to engage with community leaders and a chance to offer recommendations on ways to “reduce the number of injuries and deaths to or by law enforcement officers.”

APD’s most recent Racial Profiling Report indicates that traffic stops throughout the city are down big over the past half decade, from 226,401 in 2009 down to 120,056 last year. (Stops dropped 17% between 2014 and 2015.) APD’s racial numbers with regard to traffic stops look good when stacked against the national averages, yet skew a little stop-heavy when stacked up against the city’s racial demographics. (Blacks, for example, account for 12% of all traffic stops and 24% of stop-and-searches, but only make up 8% of the population – something the department committed to evening out in April.)

The department gives two reasons for the decrease: the staffing level issues (patrol staffing dropped from 88% to 81% these last two years) and a loss in community engagement time (19% to 17%, 2014 to 2015), suggesting police are running from call to call too much to pull petty speed demons over.

One more reason I’ll suggest, as learned anecdotally a few months ago through two cops in South Austin: Police are pulling people over less often because they don’t want to deal with conflict. The fewer people they pull over, the fewer unpleasant interactions they’ll have to have.

That’s probably not the best mindset to have when going into a traffic stop initiated because of the existence of probable cause. Perhaps a lesson for law enforcement should get drafted up for that.