How the Supreme Court Helped Create 'Driving While Black'

[DonViejo]

A reckoning with police violence must include a reckoning with how the nation’s highest court enabled it.

By CHRISTOPHER WRIGHT DUROCHER

04/17/2021 07:00 AM EDT

Christopher Wright Durocher is senior director of policy and program at the American Constitution Society.

The reason Brooklyn Center police pulled over Daunte Wright is unclear and largely irrelevant. The Department’s chief of police said the car he was driving had expired tags. His mother said he thought he was pulled over because he had air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror. Regardless of the reason, 20-year old Wright was shot to death by a police officer minutes after the traffic stop began.

Traffic stops figure prominently in some of the most high-profile police killings of Black people. We remember many of their names—Walter Scott, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile —but they are just a few of the many people who have been killed or died as the result of law enforcement’s expansive authority to enforce traffic laws.

Traffic stops might seem like a local matter, or a subjective police decision, but actually the practice is built on five decades of Supreme Court precedent, a set of decisions that has successively opened the door to — and given police an incentive to — use traffic stops as an invasive tool of policing aimed mostly at people of color, primarily Black people.

As a result, reckoning with police violence must include a reckoning with how U.S. Supreme Court precedent has enabled it through its decades-long campaign to empower law enforcement in the so-called War on Drugs. Litigators must continue to push the Court to revisit these damaging decisions with the goal of overturning or weakening the precedents that have put too much power and discretion in the hands of police. Federal, state, and local policymakers, meanwhile, must recognize that these precedents provide a constitutional floor for police behavior; laws and policies can and should be adopted to hold police to a higher standard.

more
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/17/how-the-supreme-court-helped-create-driving-while-black-482530

[tulipsandroses]

1. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the " justice system". What do we want policing to be?

What does public safety mean? For all of these horrific killings, how many of those communities felt safer? Instead of safety, communities feel terrorized and traumatized.
I recall a prosecutor on MSNBC saying most people would think that the majority of cases in criminal court are for violent crimes, but they are not. He said the vast majority, I think he said it was 80% were for minor violations. He was pushing for getting those cases out of criminal court. He was not saying people should not pay a price for violations, but they should not be in criminal court and with locking people up.
So there needs to be changes made there. We don't need police with guns responding to every situation. The public is not safer when police are spending a good deal of their time chasing petty crimes, and in their pursuit of those crimes people end up dead and communities continue to be traumatized.

[mopinko]

2. i got in more trouble for weeds and roosters than the crazy person who kept trespassing

on my property, or the asshole who threw a 1oz beer at my head.
srly, the person was in my yard and i called 911 and got a 5 min argument from the dispatcher. and a promised cruiser that never arrived.

and the assholes at the end of the block w the m100's the whole month of june? fuggitaboudit.

srsly, what are they for?

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

3. K&R