The Democratic mayor of Philadelphia is set to change the law enforcement landscape of the city for years to come. If Mayor Jim Kenney signs the Driving Equality Bill into law, police officers will no longer be allowed to stop drivers for minor traffic violations. The city council voted in favor of the equality bill 14-2 to outline that broken lights or license plate issues are “secondary violations” that don’t warrant a police officer spending taxpayer money stopping drivers for these issues that have low safety concerns.
Instead of getting pulled over by an armed police officer, drivers who make these secondary violations will receive a citation or a warning by mail. Officers are still encouraged to pull over drivers who make “primary violations” because these issues are a concern for public safety.
The new law will help fix some of the racial inequalities Philadelphia residents face. Police officers in the City of Brotherly Love targeted Black drivers more than others. Black drivers makeup only 48 percent of Philadelphia’s population but make up 67 percent of the targets for traffic stops, whereas only 12 percent of white drivers face police stops.
Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, who introduced the bill, believes it will help stop police officers from unfairly targeting Black people.
“Too many people who look like me, a traffic stop is a rite of passage — we pick out cars, we determine routes, we plan our social interactions around the fact that it is likely that we will be pulled over by police,” said Thomas. “For too long, our communities have been overwhelmingly targeted by unfair and unnecessary police stops.”
Once signed, the Equality Bill will go into effect in 90 days.
A separate investigation by the New York Times found that “over the past five years, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife, or under pursuit for a violent crime — a rate of more than once a week.”
Police officers are also at risk during routine traffic stops. Sometimes they are killed. A Chicago cop was shot and killed by a passenger after pulling over a car for expired registration. Fortunately, police deaths in this way are very rare.
“An officer’s chances of being killed at any vehicle stop are less than 1 in 3.6 million, excluding accidents,” two studies cited by The New York Times have shown. “At stops for common traffic infractions, the odds are as low as 1 in 6.5 million, according to a 2019 study by Jordan Blair Woods, a law professor at the University of Arkansas.”
The new bill could help protect innocent drivers from unnecessary violence by police officers as well as protect police officers from the rare instances when routine traffic stops prove fatal.
Professor Dennis Jay Kenny of John Jay College of Criminal Justice told CNN, “the danger of not eliminating [traffic stops for minor infractions] is that it drives a wedge between the public and the police. If you’re tired of driving while Black, you’re less likely to cooperate during these stops.”