This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Yesterday, the jury delivered a verdict in the federal trial of three of the five Memphis, Tennessee police officers responsible for the fatal beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols during a 2023 traffic stop. The jury spent three weeks listening to powerful testimony, including from the other two officers involved who have already pleaded guilty. The verdict was mixed. All three officers were found guilty of witness tampering, but two were acquitted of all civil rights charges and one was found guilty of a less serious civil rights violation.
The fact that these officers will be held accountable for their actions is important and may provide some measure of comfort to the Nichols family. At the same time, individual prosecutions against police officers for misconduct are exceedingly rare, often yield mixed results, and are insufficient to honor the memory of those like Nichols who should still be alive today. To prevent the needless deaths of more Black Americans during traffic stops, we need to pursue meaningful systemic change in police traffic enforcement.
Police officers interact with the public via traffic stops more than at any other time — they make roughly 20 million of them per year. Black motorists are stopped more often and are more likely to be searched than their white counterparts, despite being less likely to possess illegal drugs or weapons. As many as half of all traffic stops are made for minor infractions unrelated to dangerous driving, and police often use these pretextual stops as an excuse to investigate other crimes — an often unsuccessful practice rife with racial profiling.
Traffic stops for minor violations are not only pervasive, ineffective and racially biased — they also put drivers’ safety at risk. Last year, nearly one-tenth of the 1,352 people killed by police in America were killed during the course of a traffic stop. Police use of force is even more common. On an annual basis, police use or threaten to use force on 1 million people, resulting in 75,000 nonfatal injuries. These dangers are more real for people of color, who experience greater risk of an encounter with police escalating into violence, and who are three times more likely than white people to be killed by police.
No amount of money, fame or notoriety can shield Black drivers from the dangers of police traffic stops. Last month, Tyreek Hill was pulled over and physically restrained by Miami-Dade police officers while he was only a few blocks from the stadium where he would later play in the Miami Dolphins home opener. Hill — like so many others whose experiences with police violence have made the national headlines — called for the officers involved to be held accountable, and to reignite the fight for police reform that has stalled in recent years.
Nichols’ murder also spurred lawmakers to confront the pervasion of racial injustice within police enforcement of traffic laws. The Memphis City Council made progress by passing a series of reforms, including one aimed at reducing traffic stops for minor infractions like broken tail lights. Similar driving equality policies have been implemented elsewhere, but the pushback to this public safety win in Memphis was swift. Less than a year after the bill passed, conservative lawmakers in the Tennessee state legislature preemptively overruled the will of local voters and passed a bill prohibiting local districts from enacting these types of reforms.
Tennessee’s regressive action can and should be an outlier. People with platform, influence, and policymaking authority should wield it to shine a light on the systemic changes that could mitigate some of the most harmful police traffic enforcement policies and practices in local communities. These changes include:
- Urging localities to enact driving equality laws and ordinances restricting the use of traffic stops for low-level violations that don’t endanger roadway safety, like Philadelphia and Virginia have done.
- Encouraging local police departments to adopt policies prioritizing their resources to respond to infractions that pose an immediate threat to traffic safety over minor violations, like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Michigan have done.
- Encouraging local prosecutors to establish policies that require the declination of cases that are based on evidence obtained during a non-safety or pretextual stop, like counties in Vermont, Michigan and Minnesota have done.
- Supporting community-focused efforts such as organizing brake-light clinics in Memphis, assessing alternatives to police traffic enforcement in Los Angeles, and improving data transparency in Connecticut.
For too long, certain police officers have abused their power by inflicting harm on the very people they’re sworn to serve — making driving more dangerous for Black Americans and other people of color. Holding individual officers accountable for violence and misconduct is critical, but systemic change requires systemic action in partnership with the people who live this reality every day. We’re seeing successful policy strategies take hold in communities across the country, proving that it is possible to move past individualized justice and America’s legacy of racial bias, over-policing, and undue violence.
