I watched 100 traffic stop videos so you don't have to.

Nobody is safe out there.

Typical traffic stop in 2021 if you’re Black and you’re driving.

It’s either a coincidence or serendipity that I finally decided to get around to writing this piece on the day the New York Times published a huge front-page story called “How Broken Taillights End in Killings by Police” that is concerned with the stops that turn out to be deadly.  It’s an excellent story based on what appears to have been a lengthy investigation.

It’s filled with significant statistics: “Over the past five years, a New York Times investigation found, 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 one a week,” the Times reports.  “Only five have been convicted of crimes in those killings, according to a review of the publicly reported cases. Yet local governments paid at least $125 million to resolve about 40 wrongful-death lawsuits and other claims.”  The Times goes on to point out that most of the traffic stops resulting in death were for minor violations like speeding or running a red light, and “relative to the population, Black drivers were overrepresented among those killed.”

The Times reports that during 2021, 10 police officers have been killed during traffic stops.  Over the last five years, “about 60 (police officers) died — mostly by gunfire — at the hands of motorists who had been pulled over, a Times analysis showed.”  The Times goes on to note that during the same time, a total of 280 cops were killed on the job. 

Police pull over “tens of millions” of cars and trucks every year, according to the Times report.  “Vehicle stops far outnumber every other kind of police dealings with civilians.”

I got interested in the interactions between police and civilians during traffic stops because videos of such stops kept popping up on my Facebook newsfeed.  Click on just one of them and you’ll end up down a rabbit hole of YouTube videos of police traffic stops. Only a couple of the more than 100 I’ve watched ended up in cops using their guns.  All of the others were routine stops.  Some were recorded by drivers, some by police body-cams, and some were excerpted from cable TV shows about cops filmed by crews riding along with police while they were on patrol.

The first few videos I saw were clearly posted because the behavior of the police officers was so outrageous.  The traffic stop would start normally with a cop pulling a car over, and then it would quickly devolve into a violent encounter with the cop violently pulling a driver out of the car and throwing him or her to the ground and making an arrest.  Usually what provoked the cop was innocent behavior by the driver – asking why they had been pulled over, taking what the cop considered to be too long to produce a license and registration.

But if you keep following the threads of videos on YouTube, you quickly come upon videos that are far more routine, or at least they seem to be until you pay attention to what’s happening.  I didn’t keep count because my fascination with the traffic stop videos began casually, and I didn’t tag them so I could go back and look at them again.  But soon I began to see patterns.

The first was the race of the drivers and passengers, which follows the Times’ notation that Blacks were “overrepresented” in the videos I saw.  But the other patterns I noticed didn’t have anything to do with the race of the drivers or passengers.  They had to do with the reasons for the traffic stops and the behavior of the police officers.

I noticed two things about far too many of the stops:  When they were legitimate, the stops were for very, very minor infractions like license plate lights that were out, or a broken taillight, or in one outrageous case, failure to use a turn signal before the car was 100 feet away from a stop sign. 

The other thing I noticed was how many of the stops were what I would call “police-generated.”  Cops would follow cars or trucks for miles before noticing a minor infraction and pulling them over.  Or the cop would “run the plate” of a car that had caught his or her attention and discover it was out of date, or the registration was valid but no insurance was shown.  A remarkable number of cars pulled over for those reasons were driven by black drivers.  Cops didn’t seem to “run the plates” of white drivers very often.

Some drivers were pulled over because they looked at the cops  “suspiciously” when the police car passed them.  The cop would do a U-turn and catch up to them and pull them over for “looking suspicious.”  I saw at least a dozen videos of confrontations between police and drivers that weren’t traffic stops at all.  The police would pull up behind a parked car with their lights on and get out and question the driver about why he or she was parked there because “someone called in a complaint.”  Not all of the drivers in such situations were Black, but 90 percent of them were. 

The most frequent reason given for questioning the drivers of the parked cars was that the complaint they responded to claimed that the car or more often the driver “looked suspicious.”  In nearly every case, the driver was Black and the neighborhood where the car was parked was white.  In several instances, the driver was simply passing through and pulled over and parked to use the phone.  Two guys were real estate agents looking for homes that were for sale.  What was “suspicious” about them was that they were Black.

The behavior of the police in nearly every video I watched was unusually similar.  The cops would tell the drivers to roll down their windows and ask for their license and registration and what they were doing or where they were coming from and where they were going.  If the drivers had the temerity to ask why they had been stopped, in far too many cases the cops told them they had to identify themselves first, then they would tell the drivers the reason they were stopped. 

Drivers who reacted to this police behavior with questions of their own were frequently told to get out of the car.  In quite a few videos, the drivers had their licenses and registrations in their hands ready to hand over before they were ordered out of the car.  If the drivers hesitated, or kept asking why they had been stopped, many of the cops would pull their doors open and then order them out of the car, and if they didn’t move fast enough, the cops would grab them and pull them out of their cars.  The cops would order them to put their hands on top of the car and then then handcuff them.

The reasons given for handcuffing the drivers were incredible.  “You’re not under arrest, you’re being detained,” was the most frequent reason.  Many drivers were completely confused about why the stop or their being handcuffed happened at all.  “You’ll be told when I’ve completed my investigation,” was a frequent answer.  Or the cop would say, “I’m detaining you for my own protection until I can complete my investigation.”

In several cases, the cops ordered drivers out of their cars, and when the drivers opened their doors and exited the cars, the cops immediately grabbed them and told them “I told you not to come up on me.”  That phrase was repeated frequently: “Don’t you come up on me,” or “you’re coming up on me.”

The other common phrase they used when “detaining” the driver was “you’re not complying with my lawful order.”  In a couple of instances, the driver was already complying, and the cop had to take the license and registration he had asked for out of the hand of the driver in order to cuff him.

The phrases and words “comply” and “failure to comply” and “lawful order” and “investigation” and “detain” and “for my own protection” and “suspicious” came up again and again and again.  It became obvious to me that the police officers had learned the phrases and words either during police academy or from observing other officers. 

An astounding amount of what the police officers said to the drivers had no real meaning or basis in law.  Many officers demanded that drivers identify themselves because there was a “state law” commanding that civilians follow the lawful orders of police officers.  When drivers knew the law and pointed out that the law said they couldn’t be asked to identify themselves unless the police had a reasonable suspicion they had committed a crime, the officers told them to “comply” anyway.  In several instances the drivers later challenged the stop in court and had their arrests thrown out on the basis of police misconduct in asking for their ID wrongfully, or searching their cars without reasonable cause. 

In far too many cases, the “crime” the driver had allegedly committed was so minor it was in fact just a violation, like a broken taillight, or going a mile or two an hour over the speed limit.  In several videos the drivers were accused of not having insurance because the records accessed by the cops on their computers said they didn’t.  When the drivers argued with the cops that they in fact had insurance but they didn’t have their cards, they were ordered out of the car and “detained” in handcuffs, and only after the driver demanded to speak with a supervisor and a sergeant showed up was the driver allowed to access his phone and pull up the insurance record that way.  Meanwhile, the drivers had sometimes been handcuffed for 15 to 20 minutes wrongfully.

And these were the non-violent traffic stops, or at least the drivers hadn’t been violent, but the police had sometimes violently pulled them from their cars and handcuffed them for violations that turned out to be bogus.

I watched enough of these traffic stops – and non-stops, like questioning Black drivers of parked cars – to conclude that the phraseology of the police and the other behavior like demanding to be shown ID’s before they had even told the drivers what the stop was for – was a pattern that clearly results from police culture as much as anything else.  In far too many cases, the police behavior does not result from following the laws, traffic or otherwise.  Police officers often demand that their orders be followed even when the commands are unlawful.  They demand identification of drivers when the drivers aren’t required to show ID.  They are way too eager to handcuff and “detain” drivers for bogus reasons like “my own protection” when they haven’t faced a threat of any kind.

It is the authoritarian culture of policing that in many, many cases led to the shootings by police of unarmed drivers during traffic stops.  The drivers didn’t “comply” leading the officers to escalate the stop into a confrontation that led to violence.  But by far the most frequent result of the police behavior I watched on YouTube videos was drivers being treated poorly and being inconvenienced or outright unlawful detention or arrest of drivers who turned out to be innocent of the bogus reasons the police gave for stopping them.

I looked up the statistics for police deaths beyond the number of cops killed during traffic stops or in the course of carrying out their duties.  By far the greatest cause of police deaths has been COVID over the last year and a half.  “More than 460 American law enforcement officers have died from Covid-19 infections tied to their work since the start of the pandemic, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page,” the New York Times reported.  Thousands of police are refusing to be vaccinated around the country even when facing mandates, which is another instance of the authoritarian nature of the police causing deaths that could be avoided if cops spent less time breaking laws and more time following them.

Nobody should have to die during traffic stops, police officers or civilians.  And nobody should have to endure the police misbehavior I saw again and again on traffic stop videos.  It’s an epidemic of authoritarianism and it would stop if police training emphasized the rights of civilian drivers as much as it clearly emphasizes the right of police officers to enforce the law.  It’s got to stop.

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