What I Got Wrong On Defunding Police

Automated traffic enforcement mostly solved the issues a civilian traffic enforcement program would target. But Americans have a bigger issue making substantive police reform impossible.

Major apologies to my subscribers for the month-long hiatus I took. I spent a long time in Japan and didn’t particularly feel like forcing myself to write stuff. Now that I’m back in the grove, I have a huge backlog to publish. Thanks for sticking around. A lot of content is coming this week.

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The United States rumbles from mass civil unrest over the abuses enacted by immigration police who under orders of Trump are targeting non-violent immigrants, often at immigration hearings. While there may be appetite for the abolition of ICE, a relatively young agency which I support ending, I doubt we will see another frenzy of police abolition politics like we saw in 2020. After the murder of George Floyd, city halls throughout the nation were flooded by youth activists demanding tremendous police budget cuts and mainstream liberal politicians flirted with quasi-libertarian/ anarchist beliefs of society without law enforcement. I was quite taken into the idea of radical reductions to police which spurned me and a few others to launch an idea that traffic enforcement should be civilianized.

This proposal went quite further than most abolitionist requests in the legislative process and almost came to fruition. It was predicated on factual data that the vast majority of public interactions with police are through traffic stops. Our initiative wasn’t embraced by the local police abolitionists in Berkeley who were mostly organized by left-wing groups to start a non-police wellness check organization. Incidentally, I had mobilized a similar pilot program for our transit system a year or two earlier which is still in operation today. Our civilian traffic enforcement initiative made much bigger headlines nationally and landed a profile of me in the Atlantic and a mention in the New York Times and Bloomberg.

But I must admit that it appears to have failed. We did not civilianize traffic enforcement because it’s prohibited by state law and legislators failed to legalize a pilot program. The energy behind the initiative died down as Berkeley, like most U.S. cities, were besieged by anti-social drivers and crime rings doing quick hit robberies and fleeing by car. It might still technically be in the City of Berkeley’s police reform backburner but the initiative seems quietly dead. Just as dead as most of “Defund the Police” is today which at best has shrunken back to use of force reform laws. Even popular socialist candidates like Zohran Mamdani of New York City or recently elected mayor of Oakland and progressive icon Barbara Lee support increased police staffing.

I’m willing to admit that I may have been wrong in this specific proposal for civilian traffic officers. The need for traffic reform was not wrong: cops do mostly interact with the public through traffic stops. Traffic stops are a major source of anxiety for both motorists and police and a common median for police violence. Traffic law does blend criminal and non-criminal investigations together in a way that waters down the legality of warrant-less searches. Research does suggest that the severity of police traffic enforcement does not correlate with improved traffic safety, mostly because traffic enforcement is often used as warrant-less investigations and rather than traffic safety. We were right to initiated a civil traffic department and ban pre-textual stops requiring cops to conduct criminal suspicion stops rather than traffic laws as a pretext.

But I noticed the civilian enforcement idea lacked support among key constituents necessary to make it work. I didn’t say it publicly at the time but non-police labor union leaders told me in private conversations that no public workers would ever risk being a non-law enforcement traffic officer. That few civilian motorists would obey a civil servant that has no gun, badge and arresting powers pulling them over. Nor would many civil servants volunteer themselves as motorists are notorious for road rage and are prone to violence.

I had used civilian parking enforcement as a model for traffic enforcement but the parking officer union told me that they already dealt with physical blow-back from enraged drivers outside their vehicles. They thought it would be worse with motorists in their vehicles potentially concealing weapons and operating a potential weapon itself. The local abolitionists’ program to civilianize welfare checks (known as the Specialized Care Unit) which was successfully implemented still ran into an issue where civilian healthcare workers quickly deferred to the police at the first sign of escalation and conflict.

I think it was clear to me very early on that reducing unnecessary civilian and police interactions would require automated traffic enforcement technology. I didn’t embrace it initially because left-wing groups were opposed to automated traffic enforcement due to the fear of mass surveillance. But overtime I was convinced these fears can be addressed with privacy regulations and civilian control of traffic data, which are extremely important components of transitioning to a technological enforcement system.

Before I was a motorist, I didn’t fully understand left-wing opposition to traffic surveillance technology because non-motorists are already mass surveilled. Every transit station I’ve been in has a security camera in it, every transit vehicle has a GPS locator of my transit vehicle, and my transit card contains data that could identify my whereabouts. Many sidewalks are covered with often unsecured CCTV cameras. Cars in comparison are some of the least surveilled things in society which is ironic since they’re among the most deadly.

After I became a motorist I became supportive of traffic surveillance technology because it wasn’t life threatening and it didn’t discriminate. Like most Black men, I was taught by my parents how to preserve my life in the event of a traffic stop. But when I got a traffic ticket for not having a FasTrak, I didn’t need to do that: I just got a ticket in the mail. I watched red light cameras ticket drivers no matter their race, my friend got a ticket for driving in the bus lane, and it seemed much more effective at scaring drivers into behaving correctly. An outcome which has not occurred with manned police traffic enforcement whose effectiveness is only when police are visible and rarely in the same spot twice.

More research on traffic enforcement technology also supports that it does not discriminate in issuing tickets. Traffic technology can be disproportionately placed in low-income areas and disproportionately hit minority drivers. That can be problematic if the road design encourages speeding and then cameras are placed to get tickets. But if you drive correctly, you don’t get a ticket. No officer necessary. I’ve driven for three years now and have only gotten standard toll payment tickets.

There should be civilian control over where traffic cameras are placed, presumably by traffic engineers and data overseen by civilian departments and community review boards. But this is a more promising approach to reducing police interactions than a civilian force. Automated enforcement has been widely deployed in many nations particularly in Europe and East Asia; in both urban areas and speed cameras in the countryside. This would save lives from both police violence and general traffic violence and improve the biases in policing that the majority of Americans experience.

I also think that police should transition to using plate readers and drones when following suspects. Since Governor Gavin Newsom ordered California Highway Patrol to engage in law enforcement in Oakland’s crime-heavy sectors, the city has been besieged with dangerous chases. An Oakland man who was a teacher was killed thanks to a suspect crashing during a police chase. While I don’t blame this death on California Highway Patrol that was pursing the reckless driver who hit the man, if someone is already reckless enough to disobey traffic laws, endangering more lives to chase them is not worth it. Oakland is now debating between letting suspects simply get away and thus be immune to traffic laws as had been the status-quo, or chasing down suspects and risking the lives of bystanders per Newsom’s new initiative.

I think there’s a third option. There’s not too much research on plate reader and drone use so if this proves to be ineffective or abusive then I’ll oppose it. But it’s been promising seeing crime suspects get away from crime scenes without deadly police chases and law enforcement in other jurisdictions catch them thanks to plate readers. Like my transit vehicle having a GPS on it, I don’t see much of a difference with my car being tracked at random spots. I’d much prefer that technology over deadly police chases.

When automated plate readers were being rolled out in Berkeley I did privately debate with progressive activists who were mobilizing to oppose them who I respect. They and the ACLU’s disposition was that vehicles should not have their whereabouts known, even at the cost of it being exceedingly difficult to track down drivers who disobey traffic laws. I think the ACLU and like-minded people are stuck in thinking that because everything you do might have a disproportionate impact on something, nothing can be done. I think that operating a vehicle that kills 40,000 annually carries a significant moral and legal responsibility. That status-quoism — cops handing you traffic tickets and 40,000 dying from car accidents — is as much a choice as is automating enforcement and using traffic cameras.

But surveillance concerns by the ACLU and others are valid concerns that must be addressed. Data collection should be in the purview of civilian departments and police should have to get a warrant to access information. If we can’t control the data that plate reader companies are using then we should probably not use them. There should be regulations against departments sharing information without request. For camera technologies where police have direct control, we should have local civilian oversight boards and regulations on use and sharing data before deployment. I would not want my police sharing plate data with immigration officers and out of state departments chasing immigrants and women seeking abortions. But this is already happening even without traffic technology, through plate readers on police vehicles, social media, and other forms of surveillance like unsecured CCTV cameras.

Automated enforcement is still no substitute for traffic engineering. My experience in Japan has shown me a much better society where roads seldom exceed more than two or three lanes in dense urban areas, and how effective that is at curbing deadly driving.

But something that frustrated me about the Defund the Police period is seeing the police as a uniquely violent institution, and not a reflection of American culture. The American people and police are just more fatal compared to OECD nations, entirely because of gun proliferation, and it doesn’t work to pretend policing is divorced from society at large. Gun control — primarily handguns — should be an essential component of any activist campaign to reduce police violence.

British police killed two people last year; American police killed 1,365.

It’s the guns, stupid.

Any American who sees a police officer in Britain or Japan is astonished by how demilitarized and civil they are compared to the United States. Even New York City police seem far less trigger happy and frightened by conflict than almost anywhere else in the U.S. due to the city’s restrictive gun control. Even though Britain has a terrible knife-crime problem, they don’t have the guns and high homicide rates to justify mass militarization of their police.

The fact that liberals have completely lost on gun control since President Obama wept over the Sandy Hook massacre to the extent that gun control is not even a debate issue for presidential elections anymore concedes that America is a uniquely violent nation. Such foundational concessions make it impractical to disarm police, reduce police aggression and engage in ideological concepts of anarchism and non-authoritative power structures as we briefly did in 2020.

Replacing wellness checks and other lower-risk tasks with non-police officers to increase personnel and increase safety is good. There’s a fiscal case for civilian enforcement in the U.S. since public workers are paid significantly less than urban police officers. Doing basic things like being visible to discourage harassment, anti-social behavior and minor fights in places with high foot traffic are good. Having police collecting six figure salaries doing traffic enforcement when technology and road engineering can do it contributes to America’s abysmally high unsolved criminal cases.

The broader police abolitionist argument that many social issues should be invested in rather than reacted to with police is correct, however it didn’t make sense to focus on city general funds rather than the role of the federal government in subsidizing services like healthcare. Or the states’ abdication of funding law enforcement and education for prisons, resulting in greater local burdens which perhaps explains why people were so focused on local municipal general funds. (Great article on this funding problem BTW).

If we really want to not live in a country where people are frightened by police, we cannot live in a country where people are frightened by each other. I don’t know how you can have a high trust, peaceful society when there are more guns than people in this nation. Everything seems derivative of that issue and it’s very depressing that decentralized anarchism seemed more realistic than reducing gun proliferation in 2020.

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