Last week, two news stories broke with enormous significance not just for redesigning public safety in the United States, but for beginning to redress racialized trauma older than the country itself.
On Wednesday, Connecticut's Commissioner of the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection (DESPP), James Rovella, spoke before state legislators regarding a recently released audit of racial profiling by state police. The audit found that from 2014-2021, officers had lied on at least 25,966 records in order to undercount Black and Brown drivers stopped.
“I don’t have definitive information whether DOJ [the U.S. Department of Justice] is going to sign in as the investigative agency; I think that will be the case,” Rovella said, noting that he believes an investigation will be opened in a matter of days. “Presently, we’re receiving subpoenas from the federal Department of Transportation inspector general’s office for materials.” Gov. Ned Lamont has named a former U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut to lead a state probe.
The Center for Policing Equity (CPE) acknowledges that these are appropriate first steps, but the audit's findings underscore the urgent need to pass legislation to more directly address racially biased traffic enforcement in Connecticut. During the past legislative session, CPE joined local organizations to advocate for Senate Bill 1195, legislation that, if passed, would end a range of low-level vehicle stops that contribute most significantly to racially inequitable policing outcomes and have little impact on traffic safety. We call on the legislature to move quickly to pass SB 1195 during next session and bring an end to stops that unfairly target Black and Brown drivers.
In Tennessee the following day, DOJ launched a civil rights investigation of the Memphis Police Department (MPD). The investigation comes some seven months after Tyre Nichols was beaten to death in the course of a traffic stop; the officers who killed him have been charged with second-degree murder.
Speaking to the press, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke said the probe had not been opened in response to a single incident but to an extensive DOJ review of public records and information gathered from local residents.
“This federal civil rights investigation will examine whether police violated the Constitution or federal civil rights laws in a systemic way,” Clarke said. In the course of the probe, also known as "a pattern and practice" investigation, DOJ will consider MPD's use of force patterns; whether the department has generally discriminated against Black people; and if officers have unjustly targeted Black drivers in vehicle stops. Similar DOJ investigations, including one conducted following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, have taken two years to complete.
Neither of these news reports came as a shock to Black and Brown communities. Together, the release of seven years of deeply disturbing findings in Connecticut and the launch of a pattern and practice investigation in Memphis demonstrate the dangers that routine traffic stops regularly pose to drivers, especially Black and Brown folks. Flagrant efforts to hide the magnitude of the threat in one state and the horrific killing of a Black man halfway across the country are different expressions of the same racist violence that serves not as a source of public safety but of public endangerment.
CPE has done extensive work on how best to fundamentally redesign traffic enforcement across the country, in order to both improve traffic safety and serve communities who now live under constant threat.
These new investigations are absolutely necessary, but lawmakers need not wait for the outcome of recently launched probes to begin to address the facts that are long established. Neither the Connecticut numbers nor the vicious killing of Tyre Nichols came as a surprise to the Black people of this country; this is the reality with which we live every day. The time is long past to transform the systems of punishment that are a daily threat to our safety into systems of care that meet our communities' needs.