Why Cars Don’t Deserve the Right of Way
On a hot June evening in Berkeley, California, last year, while his groceries sweated on the couch, 24-year-old Darrell Owens sent a tweet that changed his city.
“Traffic enforcement needs to be totally removed from the police …” it began.
Just a few weeks earlier, Owens had watched George Floyd being murdered in an intersection and had joined in the protests. The Berkeley city council had since promised police reform. But Owens, who, at 6 foot 6, is known by one city-council member as the “youngest, tallest, and only Black” regular attendee of transportation-commission meetings, had been stewing on a more specific idea. His Twitter thread laid out his argument for transforming law enforcement by transforming city streets: “I prefer license plate cameras … and mailed tickets over: ‘ok make sure nobody does anything that justifies this cop pumping 4 rounds of lead into me.’”
To his surprise, the city responded. A council member retweeted his thread. A month later, the city council passed “BerkDOT,” a first-in-the-nation measure to shift traffic enforcement to unarmed Department of Transportation workers.
In the summer of 2020, cities across America made similar commitments: to curtail the use of force, shrink police budgets, and fund fleets of civilian officers. But Berkeley was the first to target the traffic cop. By doing so, it is rethinking police power at its root.
Traffic stops are by far the most common reason that police officers initiate contact with members of the public; they account for 84 percent of encounters, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In fact, before cars, ordinary citizens rarely came in contact with law enforcement. As we rebuilt cities around the automobile, historians contend, drivers came to expect to be policed. And communities of color have paid the highest price.
In Berkeley, Black drivers are to be stopped as white drivers, and four times for Black and brown drivers, as the deaths of Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and Daunte Wright illustrated.
