Traffic stops as criminal investigations: Pretext stops should be disallowed in Minnesota (opinion)

[WhiskeyGrinder]

This article is from 2019 but extremely relevant wrt the cop killing of Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minn.

https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2019/06/traffic-stops-as-criminal-investigations-pretext-stops-should-be-disallowed-in-minnesota/

In 1996, a unanimous Supreme Court decided that pretext traffic stops by police officers were constitutional. The case, United States v. Whren, allows police officers to use minor traffic violations — such as failure to signal a lane change, not wearing a seatbelt, or going a mile or two over the speed limit — to justify stopping a car to investigate other potential wrongdoing. As long as the officer can identify a violation of the traffic code, the stop does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable seizures, despite being a pretext for investigation of unrelated criminal activity.

Less than one year later, the Minnesota Supreme Court acknowledged the potential abuse of traffic stops after Whren. Confronted with whether a driver voluntarily consented to a search after a pretext stop, the court wrote, “Underlying our consideration of the consent issue are our serious concerns related to the ‘pretext problem,’ inasmuch as the Supreme Court has now made clear that the constitutional reasonableness of a traffic stop does not turn on the actual motivations of the officer involved.”

One of the Minnesota Supreme Court’s concerns was that very few drivers can go very far without violating some aspect of the traffic code. In other words, if officers want to investigate a driver for any reason, they simply follow the car long enough to find a minor traffic violation to justify the stop. The second issue was, “that police, who have enormous discretion in enforcing traffic laws, may take advantage of their right to stop motorists for routine traffic violations in order to target members of groups identified by factors that are totally impermissible as a basis for law enforcement activity.” One of these impermissible factors is, of course, race.

The Minneapolis Police Department’s public website has a dashboard with data on traffic stops and searches. No other police department in the country voluntarily displays such extensive demographic data. According to Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, this transparency is meant to promote difficult discussions about race. In 2018, Minneapolis Police Officers stopped 7,195 cars for equipment violations. Although the black population in Minneapolis is 18.8 percent, 54.8 percent (3,940) of those drivers stopped were black. The police did searches after 856 of those equipment stops, and 640 of those searched were black. So when the police conducted a search after a traffic stop for an equipment violation, 74.8 percent of those searched were black.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

1. Kick.