Taking the Police out of Traffic Law Enforcement

Matthew Pritchard at the Federalist has come up with what may be one of the best ideas I have heard in quite awhile:

Think of the last time you had to interact with a police officer. Chances are, it was a traffic stop. Most Americans drive, and in a country where it’s nearly impossible not to violate some criminal law while behind the wheel, to drive is literally to be a criminal. Being a criminal means the cops can stop and arrest you at any time, even to investigate a crime that has nothing to do with any traffic violation.

That’s not a big deal for most people, since they know the rare traffic ticket is probably the worst that can happen. But when getting pulled over can mean violence or even death, the prospect of a traffic stop can be a constant menace.

As anyone who isn’t willfully ignorant knows, that’s the reality facing many black (and brown) Americans today. Poverty dynamics, implicit bias, and a judiciary that has interpreted the Fourth Amendment to place few limits on police discretion all combine to create an environment in which police-related violence has become unacceptably commonplace. 

...The time has long since come to attack this systemic defect at its root. That means abolishing our criminal traffic laws and replacing them with an administrative enforcement system.

We’ve come to take it for granted, but it’s actually bizarre that we use police officers and criminal courts to enforce basic traffic regulations. In every other similar context — fire codes, building standards, occupational rules, and a host of others — we use administrative systems to enforce society’s health and safety standards, not criminal laws and criminal law enforcement. Yet we’re no less safe as a result.

The difference is important. Unlike police officers, administrative personnel don’t investigate crimes and aren’t empowered to arrest or detain. So, for example, when a contractor doesn’t construct a building with access to a fire escape, or a restaurant owner doesn’t require her employees to wash their hands, they aren’t arrested or put in jail by a police officer. A code enforcement official just issues them a citation or an order to correct the violation.

There’s no reason it should be any different when dealing with turn signals and speed limits rather than building construction and sanitation. Except for serious offenses like drunk or reckless driving (which should remain criminal laws), traffic violations don’t pose an imminent danger to safety.

The guy who doesn’t use his signal before changing lanes may be annoying, even incautious. But no one’s going to be hurt if he’s merely fined rather than detained by a police officer the moment he commits his transgression. Just as with any other regulatory scheme, we can rely on administrative enforcement rather than the criminal justice system to deter everyday bad driving and keep us safe.

One reason we’ve gotten so accustomed to our criminal regime is that a traffic stop lets a police officer cite the actual driver who commits a violation, whereas in an administrative system enforcement officials would likely just send the car’s registered owner a fine by mail. We already enforce parking laws this way, and it makes sense. The theory is that a car’s owner is responsible for making sure his car is used properly, even if he permits other people to use it. That theory applies equally in the context of minor traffic violations.

But even if we wanted to preserve the practice of on-the-spot vehicle stops, enforcement officers in an administrative system would have no criminal investigative authority, so the stop would consist of nothing more than citing and releasing the offending driver. This type of strictly non-criminal, citation-only system is very different from the world of traffic cops and criminal courts we’ve always known, and the shift from one to the other could be jarring for some.

Pritchard was doing well until he got to that last part. The whole point is to end "on-the-spot vehicle stops". Transferring responsibility from a cop to a bureaucrat doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Even if the bureaucrat has no "criminal investigative authority", you are still giving them the authority to pull over cars and detain drivers, which is a policing authority. If the infraction is so heinous that a car needs to be pulled over, then the police need to be the ones doing it, not the DMV.

Other than that, Pritchard definitely has a good idea.