Ben Blatt and Emily Badger spent months compiling police data and interviewing police officials, safety advocates and other experts.
In the early days of the pandemic in 2020, traffic stops by the police plummeted around the country, as fewer cars were on the road and as agencies instructed officers to avoid nonessential contact with the public.
But in the months and years that followed, a distinct pattern formed in many cities: The cars came back in full force, but the traffic enforcement didn’t.
By the end of 2023, the police in Baltimore, New Orleans and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they did prepandemic. In other police departments that don’t publicly track stops, like in Seattle and New York, the citations given during stops dropped off, too. The downturn appears even among some state agencies that monitor road safety on highways, like the Texas Highway Patrol and Connecticut State Police.
Today, he is certain of this: “People are dying because there is at this point relatively no enforcement of traffic laws in the city of Los Angeles.”
Prepandemic, the Los Angeles police were making more than 500,000 traffic stops a year. In 2023, they made fewer than 220,000.
The downward pressure on traffic enforcement has come from every direction — the public and the police themselves, reformers and critics of reform.
“There is a kind of Right narrative and a Left narrative, and they actually converge, which is that there’s just less political support for traffic enforcement,” said Greg Shill, a law professor at the University of Iowa. “You can see that as: ‘Cops need to get home safe, and they’re afraid of being wrongly labeled as abusive or racist.’ Or you can see it as: ‘Civilians have asserted more control over police departments.’”
This dynamic has roots well before the pandemic.
Public data tracking traffic stops, often mandated locally by laws meant to identify racial bias, covers only recent years in many places. And many cities and states publish no information.
But a longer-term decline of enforcement appears elsewhere, too. Since about 2010, D.U.I. arrests have fallen in F.B.I. crime data (with no comparable decline in alcohol-related fatalities). And the share of Americans who say they have been pulled over has fallen since at least the late 1990s in a periodic federal survey tracking contacts between the police and the public. That share has dropped in particular since 2015, after the police shooting death the prior year of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
“The decline in traffic enforcement predates Ferguson by probably 10 years or more — that’s an important thing,” said Jeff Michael, a former longtime official at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who now studies road safety at Johns Hopkins University. “But Ferguson certainly had an effect. That’s without a doubt. Ferguson, and everything after.”
That is apparent in Ferguson itself, among some other cities.
Many peer European and Asian countries have reduced fatalities by designing roads that discourage speeding and protect pedestrians and cyclists, while deploying cameras more widely.
The U.S. in essence uses the police to make up for not doing those things. And over time, that enforcement has become increasingly inseparable from fighting crime, with many stops serving no road safety outcome.
The degree to which that’s true varies. In Connecticut, at least 70 percent of stops are categorized as moving violations in nearly every jurisdiction in the state.
By contrast, in Chicago only about 30 percent of traffic stops in 2023 were for moving violations. Stops there have soared in recent years, contrary to the pattern nationwide. And they started to rise after a 2015 agreement to reform the department’s stop-and-frisk practices, suggesting that the police shifted their crime-fighting stops from pedestrians to drivers.
In the years preceding the pandemic in Burlington, Vt., traffic stops and serious crashes were declining together. That’s because while the police scaled back minor stops and vehicle searches, the city also redesigned speed humps and crosswalks, said the city’s police chief, Jon Murad.
“I believe there’s an elastic bottom to that, at which point things snapped back,” he said. And indeed during the pandemic, serious crashes rose again. “Absent enforcement, the engineering methods don’t do the job by themselves.”
Vision Zero programs, embraced by many U.S. cities to reduce road fatalities, have tried to pair police enforcement with redesigned roads and public education campaigns.
In New York, Vision Zero helped reduce road injury rates in the years leading up the pandemic. But during the pandemic, New York lost those gains, according to a study tracking injuries in Medicaid claims data. One major difference? Police enforcement plummeted, the researchers point out.
“So much of traffic safety hinges on making sure people follow the rules we’ve made for the road,” said Kacie Dragan, one of the study’s authors. “My gut feeling, from that public health perspective, is it’s a bad thing to see that decline. But that’s not the only perspective that matters.”
The question before communities today is in part whether enforcement can return, stripped of the harms that have long been a part of it.
In a country with about 18,000 local police agencies — where the department culture and rate of stops vary widely — each will need an answer.
Communities should also reconsider if they really need someone with a gun and a background in detecting crime to fill out speeding tickets, said Scarlet Neath, the policy director at the Center for Policing Equity.
Critics have many retorts: It’s unrealistic to redesign every dangerous road. Without pretextual stops, police will miss weapons and crime leads. And while better-designed roads or civilian responders may shape the behavior of typical drivers, they’re no match for the most reckless and distracted ones.
“There’s a whole laundry list of other things we support unarmed responses to, 100 percent,” said Mr. Saggau with the Los Angeles police union. “Mental-health calls — we’re on board. But when it comes to traffic — bad idea all the way around.”
We also don’t know today the full consequences of reforming traffic enforcement, including for crime trends and general police behavior, said Robin Engel, an Ohio State researcher who has long studied policing.
There are other factors at play, too.
“When you have that lived experience,” said Isaiah Thomas, a Philadelphia City Council member who led the city’s reform bill, “you know how demoralizing it can be to be a participant in a traffic stop.”
Particularly a traffic stop that feels racially targeted and unrelated to safety.
At its most raw, this debate pits two harms against each other, with communities searching for a path to lessen both.
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In Philadelphia, the Rev. Stephanie Evans lost her 37-year-old son Robert in January 2020. He was stepping out of his pickup truck when he was struck by a driver who sped away. In her grief, she has become an advocate for hit-and-run victims. To her, that means demanding more cameras — but also more of the police.
“I’m not conflicted over that,” she said, even acknowledging the damage that has come from pulling over more drivers.
“I want them stopped,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s the lesser of two evils.”
