| Abstrakt: |
In response to repeated and highly publicized killings of people at the hands of law enforcement during traffic stops, there is growing interest among distraught relatives, advocates, scholars, and lawmakers in traffic enforcement reform. These efforts have included shifts in the methods of enforcement--for example, the use of unarmed civilian units or automated enforcement devices--and restrictions on armed officers' ability to stop motorists for low-level traffic offenses. These reform initiatives have the potential to meaningfully reduce the number of traffic stops involving armed officers, and thus the number of violent incidents traffic stops routinely engender. This Article considers an underexplored dimension of traffic enforcement: how its revenue-generating capacity--through traffic ticket and forfeiture revenue--complicates the ability of reform efforts to address the quantity and quality of police-citizen interactions. A focus on revenue generation exposes two key unintended consequences of proposed traffic enforcement reform initiatives that stop short of legalization. First, lawmaker pressure on armed law enforcement to raise revenue through traffic ticketing easily shifts to civilian units or automated systems, meaning that such reforms risk replicating the budgetary and racial dynamics of traditional traffic enforcement. Second, armed law enforcement's loss of its traffic enforcement capabilities may lead to rent-seeking behavior outside of the traffic context--particularly through the enforcement of public order offenses and municipal code violations and increased reliance on non-traffic-based drug interdiction tactics at airports, bus terminals, and train stations, and through street-level stop-and-frisks. This rent-seeking behavior increases opportunities for violence in these other arenas. The end result is that heavily policed--and particularly Black and Latinx communities--may experience the worst of both worlds: new methods of traffic enforcement that continue to trap people in a web of policing and punishment on the one hand, and increased efforts by armed law enforcement to extract fines and forfeitures for nontraffic offenses on the other. Far from mitigating the overall exposure of marginalized communities to violence by law enforcement, the extraction of fines and forfeitures for nontraffic offenses enlarges the terrain of that exposure. These potential unintended consequences suggest that lawmakers and racial justice advocates seeking to reduce violence by law enforcement should design reforms to account for the revenue-generating economy of traffic enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
