I absolutely was/am not, and I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.
It’s called a work rule.
I understand that, but I’m saying that it is a pretty silly rule–given that a state has decided that all qualified adults may carry guns, a proposition outside the topic of this thread–that everyone else can carry guns except these people who almost certainly need them more. IOW, the state has already rejected the “guns are dangerous” argument and does not put a person who carries a gun in public as a maniac talking about ninja assassins.
Because you’re basically describing stop and frisk of vehicles. At the end of a day, if a cop wants to pull you over, they will.
Just look at car air fresheners. It’s an enormous industry, these dangle-from-the-rear-view-mirror air fresheners are absolutely ubiquitous. And yet cops can pull you over for them, and do - especially when you are black.
Forget these individual examples of people getting killed for a moment, horrible as they are. If cops are pulling over more black drivers then white drivers, then even if white and black drivers are equally likely to, say, drive with marijuana in the car, black drivers will be caught with it far more often. They’ll end up in jail for it far more often. And far more black kids will grow up with an absent father. That has all sorts of trickle down effects, and in fact is exactly what we see.
Are there occasionally extreme cases, where Bonnie and Clyde race down the highway and gun down anyone in their path? Yes, there are, and we should have people who are prepared and equipped for that. But when you go into every interaction loaded for bear and extremely on edge, is it any wonder relations between law enforcement and the community have soured?
99% of traffic stops don’t involve kidnapping victims or are murderers, they involve everyday people, a minor infraction, and a routine interaction. Far too many that SHOULD have gone that way ended with death instead. Let’s fix that.
Again, if any of those people tried to use those guns to hunt down criminals and make a citizens arrest, they would AT BEST lose any hope of making a successful self defense case, and far more likely will be arrested and prosecuted. Vigilantism is illegal.
Officer Traffic can carry a weapon in accordance with the laws of his state, but he may NOT use it while enforcing traffic regulations.
I don’t think we are as far apart as we might think. I do not like pretext stops. I do not like stop and frisks.
I agree with you about the air freshener thing. Police have been doing that sort of stuff for ages. But you know who is to blame for that? It is not your local cop who uses that as a pretext. It is your Legislature that continues to have a law on the books that makes it arguably illegal to drive with that hanging from your rearview mirror. All it would take is a single, short law to correct that problem, but they don’t. And those are people who represent you and I.
I don’t blame a police officer who uses legal tools to ferret out crime. That is his job. I blame the people in power who pass the buck by blaming the Supreme Court or other such prattle when they have the power to clean up the traffic code so there are not so many laws on the books. In addition to the air freshener, police pull over “suspects” when they have a frame around their license plate. You know the frame that every dealer hands out and most novelty shops sell? Police argue that obstructs the plate. Good for them…they are doing their jobs…BUT, jump all over your legislators for allowing them to do that.
However, back to the point. When police are doing their jobs, they should be able to protect themselves.
My point wasn’t so much “Traffic Safety Officers should definitely carry guns!” but rather, to assuage the fears of people who worry “But the Traffic Safety Officers would be defenseless! What if the speeder they pull over happens to be a serial killer?” that we could allow the Traffic Safety Officer to carry a gun, if he or she wishes to. Same as the pizza delivery guy. But in this case the gun wouldn’t be “a law enforcement tool”. It would be a personal self-defense weapon, same as the pizza delivery guy. I even stipulated that they’d have to keep their guns concealed, if they chose to carry guns at all, because they wouldn’t be “enforcement tools” or “badges of authority”, but strictly used for self-defense. (Same as the pizza delivery guy.) But, the Traffic Safety Officers wouldn’t be making arrests and they wouldn’t be trying to conduct searches, they would only be writing tickets.
Well, what does the pizza delivery guy do if he’s delivering a pizza and he happens to notice that the guy he’s delivering the pizza to apparently ordered a pizza because he needed something to feed to his hostage? He completes the transaction, then calls 911. Or, if the pizza delivery guy happens to be armed, maybe he makes a “citizen’s arrest”. (Although my state has apparently now completely abolished citizen’s arrests. But AFAIK, in the other 49 states you can still lawfully detain someone if you realize they’re in the middle of kidnapping someone or otherwise committing a forcible felony right before your eyes, even if you aren’t a sworn Law Enforcement Officer.)
I think it’s important to understand that these hypothetical people in some very real sense wouldn’t be traffic cops. They wouldn’t have the power or the authority of making arrests–just brief “detentions” by the side of the road–and would therefore have no power, authority, or interest in conducting searches.
And there’s a serious empirical issue, that would definitely need to be carefully studied before any such proposal was actually implemented: How often do traffic stops uncover serious crimes? @Martin_Hyde gave a cite above that claims that
Obviously it’s not the case that routine traffic stops never, ever, ever uncover serious crimes, but does that really happen often enough to justify commingling traffic safety enforcement with general law enforcement? (I personally would separate “Serious drug crimes” from “serious crimes in general”—“drug crimes” seem to be the sorts of “crimes” that traffic stops, pretextual or otherwise, most often uncover—but that’s just because I’m sick and tired of the War on Drugs. I’m even more sick and tired of the War on People Having “Too Much” Cash. Traffic Safety Officers wouldn’t be doing “civil asset forfeitures” right there by the side of the highway, either.)
Certainly we have Parking Enforcement Officers all over the USA. They drive semi-police vehicles, have semi-police uniforms, (generally) don’t carry guns, (generally) aren’t licensed sworn LEOs. They interact with the public face to face and issue legally binding citations for failure to obey the law in various minor league ways. And if they stumble on something bigger / badder than they are trained and equipped for, they bail out and call for help.
@MEBuckner’s TSOs are simply the same thing for moving violations. Sounds pretty obvious and straightforward and most of all, cheap to implement to me.
I suspect if these existed most routine traffic stops would be safer for everyone. And more true bad guys would simply speed away from the flashing lights, knowing the TSO won’t pursue. Meanwhile any number of innocent people won’t get shot.
At least as long as at the same time we eliminate pretext stops and racial profiling by the real LEOs. If all we do is keep the same illegal immoral shenanigans that creates so much distrust in the police and add TSOs on top of that toxic sludge, … well, we won’t have accomplished a damn thing.
Clearly you don’t. An employer has the right to tell their employee if they’re allowed to carry a loaded handgun while on official business, and there’s nothing silly about it. There isn’t even anything vaguely controversial about it either.
Considering that the entire concept of disarming traffic cops is to broadcast to the public that the person pulling you over isn’t a threat to your health, or safety, or freedom, and you have absolutely nothing to fear from them. They aren’t going to taser you, shoot you, drag you from your car, they’re going to maybe write you a ticket and wish you safe travels. So yeah, in this concept, denying them the opportunity to carry a sidearm while on duty is pretty important, since the first time one guns down a driver is the last time anyone will believe a traffic stop isn’t a threat.
Please, write out that “single, short” law that does not allow the police to pull you over to check that vision blocking rear view mirror accessory isn’t an unlawful one.
Or are you suggesting that vision blocking rear view mirror accessories be made legal across the board.
(I’d note, I somehow doubt that these laws exist purely on a whim and only to collect revenue from violation fines.)
“The hanging of consumer objects, including but not limited to air fresheners, novelty dice, parking passes, identification, or other products, from a rear view mirror, does not constitute a violation of this subsection. In order for any law enforcement officer to justify a traffic stop for a violation of this subsection, the officer must point to articulable facts which reasonably supports a fair inference that the driver’s vision was seriously obstructed by any object hanging from a rear view mirror.”
I know some DO think that preschool teachers should be armed, and if you are one of those then this analogy will land flat, but it is like that. Most of us recognize that the potential harms of armed preschool teachers outweigh any imagined benefits, no matter how good with a gun the preschool teacher might be. They do not need it for the job and it is inappropriate to have it on the job. Bring your gun into the preschool classroom against policy and you can expect to be fired on the spot, state laws allowing carry (either open or concealed) or not. A position of dedicated traffic stop cop is like that. Their being armed is a systematic risk of unjustified shootings by police. Looking at the data presented in this thread it seems the risk outweighs the benefits.
Police may witness crimes anywhere anytime. Let us accept that there are some finite number of crimes witness on random … or profiled … traffic stops. Is the benefit of that larger than the harms caused by the deaths by those stops? Heck is the benefit larger than harms caused by the distrust and lack of community cooperation that such an occupation style of policing results in, just looking at crime prevention alone? (Yes it is a very similar analysis to stop and frisk.)
When I worked (briefly) in a state prosecutor’s office, a significant percentage of the DUI arrests that were made came out of “pretextual” traffic stops – an observed violation of some minor traffic law that allowed the police stop the vehicle and engage with the driver (and discover his intoxication). The stops needed to be lawful (otherwise the breathalyzer results would get suppressed), so they were tethered to some pretextual justification, but everyone understand that the police weren’t really stopping people for failing to signal or stopping past the “stop bar” at a traffic light. (The other major source of DUI arrests was traffic accidents).
What I don’t know (and had no real way of knowing) is how many of those pretextual stops didn’t wind up in a DUI (or other serious) arrest, which would be important to assessing the distrust/community relations point. But I believe that those DUI arrests saved lives.
If these drivers were so intoxicated that their driving was a danger to themselves and others, pull them over for that. But you seem to be arguing that these people were pulled over for a pretext only - IE their driving was apparently not visibly impaired - yet they were still so intoxicated as to be dangerous? Sorry, I’m not buying it.
Pull over the dangerous drivers for driving dangerously. If you’re pulling over people for pretext, that’s when your bias (conscious or unconscious) has a chance to shine through.
I believe DUI, discovered during another justified traffic stop, would fall under the traffic officer umbrella. And does not require the officer being armed. In fact has significant benefit in the officer not being armed with potentially lethal force as substance impaired drivers might be prone to erratic behavior that gets incorrectly interpreted as a threat, especially if the driver is an”other”.
Ref this:
I generally side with @Babale’s POV. And yet.
Each of us commits minor moving violations every time we drive. Failure to signal a lane change, an almost stop at a stop sign, etc. But someone watching an unimpaired driver for a couple of miles will see one pattern of less-than-perfect driving, whereas watching an impaired driver the pattern will be different. There will be more and different miscues. No one miscue is necessarily any larger or more inherently dangerous than a typical driver, but the collective effect stands out. That driver is either unusually careless / undisciplined / scofflaw-ish, or is impaired. They stand out from the crowd.
So is it really a “pretext”, IOW pure BS, to stop that person to either deliver a lecture about more legally complaint driving or to discover if impairment is the true issue? The cause of the stop shouldn’t be seen as 1 failure to signal a lane change, but rather a pattern of multiple defects over a span of time.
For sure the alternative is to simply let sloppy driving go, and only choose to stop somebody on suspicion of impairment when their driving is borderline out of control. However that seems to fly in the face of the increased emphasis placed the last 20-30 years on keeping the drunk & drugged off the roads.
I truly don’t know the stats on whether the serious injury & fatal accidents involving alcohol are composed mostly of blind drunks who, had any LEO seen their driving before the accident, would be immediately identifiable as impaired and stopped accordingly. Or instead, are the vast majority of these accidents caused by the far more numerous “social drinkers” who meet the legal definition of impaired but who drive mostly OK except for the moment’s inattention that triggers a tragedy?
If the latter is true, then stopping sloppy drivers in search of impaired drivers heading towards accidents about to happen may well be worth it from a public safety vs civil liberties perspective. But if instead the former is true, then stopping the sloppy is a waste of time that’s much too open to stopping folks of the wrong color or SES.
As noted, we are ALL sloppy drivers, so this second quote effectively means cops should feel free to stop any drivers they wish in a search for impaired drivers.
No. You missed my point that may have been lost in my wall of words.
Stopping somebody for one failure to signal a lane change in view of a cop? Not kosher, that’s pretext BS.
Stopping somebody who’s making one minor mistake or another every 30 seconds in view of a cop but hasn’t run a red light or climbed a curb … yet? Perhaps totally reasonable if the accident stats support the idea that mild impairment is the real killer at the whole-society level.
I am sympathetic to your point @LSLGuy but as Cheesesteak points out the police can ALWAYS find a pretext to stop you. And everything we know about human nature as well as the actual statistics of real arrests show us that minorities are disproportionately likely to be pulled over, disproportionately likely to have the situation escalate, etc.
This makes sense. Maybe the police can start earning back their goodwill by looking into exactly those sorts of numbers. And in today’s day and age, with cameras on every police vehicle, if a cop thinks someone is risky because they’re making a bunch of small sloppy mistakes, they should be able to document this using their camera, and when they pull the person over present all of those sloppy mistakes as evidence of due cause.