Longtime readers may recognize the name Radley Balko. He’s worked for as diverse of entities ideologically as The Huffington Post and the Cato Institute and been published in everything from The Wall Street Journal to The Washington Post covering matters related to policing. We cite him a decent amount when talking about criminal justice.
Yesterday, in reaction to the traffic stop gone wrong in Minnesota in which police officer Kim Potter shot and killed Daunte Hunter, Balko shared this 2019 study by Jordan Blair Woods from the University of Arkansas School of Law. The study was published in the Michigan Law Review.
The study runs 79 pages, and if you’d like to really dive into it, we would never discourage that, but here’s the abstract, which covers what we’re trying to say:
This Article presents findings from the largest and most comprehensive study to date on violence against the police during traffic stops. Every year, police officers conduct tens of millions of traffic stops. Many of these stops are entirely unremarkable—so much so that they may be fairly described as routine. Nonetheless, the narrative that routine traffic stops are fraught with grave and unpredictable danger to the police permeates police training and animates Fourth Amendment doctrine. This Article challenges this dominant danger narrative and its centrality within key institutions that regulate the police.
The presented study is the first to offer an estimate for the danger rates of routine traffic stops to law enforcement officers. I reviewed a comprehensive dataset of thousands of traffic stops that resulted in violence against officers across more than 200 law enforcement agencies in Florida over a 10-year period. The findings reveal that violence against officers was rare and that incidents that do involve violence are typically low risk and do not involve weapons. Under a conservative estimate, the rate for a felonious killing of an officer during a routine traffic stop was only 1 in every 6.5 million stops, the rate for an assault resulting in serious injury to an officer was only 1 in every 361,111 stops, and the rate for an assault against officers (whether it results in injury or not) was only 1 in every 6,959 stops.
I am admittedly no expert on policing, and if there’s a statistical argument to be made against the soundness of the study, I’d be eager to hear it. But at the very least, it seems questions need to be asked about how dangerous traffic stops really are to police officers. Especially when the conventional wisdom on them seems to be that they’re extraordinarily dangerous.
If our police departments are, in fact, training officers to treat traffic stops as more dangerous than they are, it’s no wonder we’re so familiar with them turning out tragically. Being prepared to fight is a natural, instinctive reaction to fear, and familiarity with traffic stops turning dangerous for the civilian breeds, it would stand to reason, similar fear in civilians who are pulled over. This is all questioning—I’m not in a position to definitively pass judgment on this stuff—but it makes one wonder whether traffic stops would be less dangerous if officers knew how little danger they really presented.
