I believe that it should be brought into consideration how traffic laws are enforced. It can be understood how traffic stops help protect drivers and the public but, in recent years it has been deemed problematic due to the conflict between police officers and black Americans. According to the Stanford Open Policing Project, “on a typical day in the United States, police officers make more than 50,000 traffic stops.” Doing more research you can find that the people most likely to be stopped are Hispanics or black Americans. It has to do with the amount of racism that many cops take part in. A lot of them are very discriminatory towards people of color and being in those positions makes it extremely difficult for millions of citizens to have a certain kind of trust with people who have the ability to treat you unfairly and get away with a slap on the wrist. The point of a traffic stop is to make communities safer and to build trust within the law and their people but the truth is, it’s terrifying. It is more likely for a black American to get arrested or a hispanic to get arrested/ticketed than it is for a white American in both categories. If traffic stops are suppose to build trust and help keep the community safer then why is it that when the majority of those who get pulled are scared for their lives?
I believe that banning traffic stops in certain states will help tremendously. It will hopefully bring a sense of calm that wasn’t around before. In all hopes that the affected communities will feel a lot safer without being randomly stopped for something that would be deemed “suspicious” by them but not by white Americans, for example. With the banning of traffic stops maybe more and more states will start to recognize that it isn’t really necessary or effective to keep these going and one day it might all come to an end together.
