EDITORIAL: Law enforcement: Tighten rules, policies on police stops
Apr. 16—A Brooklyn Center police stop for expired license plate tabs and for an air freshener hanging from a mirror resulted in the killing of Daunte Wright and the resulting civil unrest.
Seems like a high price to pay for a routine traffic stop.
A discussion in Minnesota on rules and boundaries for stoppable traffic offenses is long overdue. Many police departments in Minnesota don't have specific policies for what's a "good stop" and a "bad stop." They leave stops up to officer discretion.
And as we can see with the Wright killing, officers use poor judgment sometimes.
In the case of expired license tabs, they are no longer valid 10 days after the month indicated on the license plates. That was the main reason Wright was stopped by officer Kim Potter in Brooklyn Center. Then Potter and the officer she was training noticed an air freshener hanging down from the mirror in Wright's car. That's another minor violation.
They asked him to get out of the car, and while he initially complied, he jumped back into his car to flee and was shot dead.
But at least one police expert said stopping a vehicle for expired tabs and calling someone out for the air freshener is a way to target people of color.
"Grabbing someone for having an air freshener hanging in their mirror is a crap stop," said Charles P. Wilson, a former Ohio police chief and now chair of the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers.
We're not sure how police figure the harm a driver will cause with expired license tabs.
Wilson told the Star Tribune that officers seeing the air freshener violation should simply tell the driver to remove it and let them be on their way. And Wilson said if police do find a warrant, as in the case of Wright, and it's not a felony, they should tell the person to take care of it.
The warrant for which Wright was going to be arrested and handcuffed involved a misdemeanor case of not showing up for a court case that involved another misdemeanor.
Other police departments in Minnesota told the Star Tribune they don't have hard and fast policies on stops for expired tabs or objects hanging from mirrors. Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. Cloud, Duluth and Anoka County law enforcement said they don't have policies on the stops.
Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope, has authored legislation that will put limits on suspected offenses for which drivers can be stopped. He had tweeted that Wright's stop "should have never happened in the first place."
Minnesota does not collect information on the race of people stopped by police. There have been a few studies of individual departments, and most show a bias toward stopping people of color.
In fact, in Falcon Heights, where Philando Castile was killed during a routine stop by police in 2016, the number of Black motorists pulled over has become even more disproportionate since the city agreed to study the issue due to Castile's killing.
A report by MinnPost last August showed Blacks were 28, 32 and 34% of all traffic stops from 2017-19, while the Black population is 17% in the Falcon Heights area.
The Minnesota Legislature and individual police departments must come up with more definitive policies for stops and be required to provide regular reports to the public.
Discretion in policing can be good, as Wilson points out. But discretion can also lead to lax accountability, and in the Wright case, death.
