Hi there, I'm a X resident. Today a police officer in Minnesota was acquitted of manslaughter after he fatally shot an unarmed man who was reaching for his drivers license. This is tragic, for the man who is dead, his family, and for the officer, who has to live with this for the rest of his life.
I'm worried about how frequently this happens, and in particular how frequently this happens to black men and women. Many preventable murders have started with a traffic stop for a failure to signal, for asking for help with a car crash, or without any cited cause. Nationwide, black men and women are stopped 30% more often than whites: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/08/the-big-question-about-why-police-pull-over-so-many-black-drivers/. Once stopped, black men and women are 1.5 to 5.2 times as likely to have their cars searched.
In addition to the obvious - preventing loss of life, and a grand jury investigation/criminal trial - these incidents frequently result in high amounts of damages in civil court, which could put a strain on the city's budget.
Can we make traffic stops safer? In particular, is it necessary for officers on foot patrol or traffic stop duty to be armed with a gun? At the first sign of trouble, they can retreat to their car and radio for armed backup. Maybe a dangerous person gets away because the responding officer does not have a gun, but better someone gets away with a crime than it is for an unarmed civilian to die. You would also still have the license plate number.
This may be a facile example, but we send parking citation officers on the streets without guns. People get mad that their cars get parking citations, yet parking citations rarely escalate into officer-involved shootings. If we trained and armed our parking citation officers, it's not clear that we would be safer overall. Applying this logic in reverse suggests we may be able to achieve an increase in safety by reducing the number of guns present during routine traffic stops.
If it's not possible for an officer to safely approach a car window without a gun, can we issue routine citations without having the police officer leave the car?
Finally, does the X PD keep statistics on traffic stops and searches by race? I tried searching the website, but didn't find any available numbers.
Thanks! Kevin