Given the Green Light: How Police Target Poor, Black Drivers
City police in Michigan spend an enormous amount of their time and resources issuing traffic tickets, with approximately 1.38 million traffic citations processed in 2016 alone. That year, police in Allen Park, Hazel Park, Romulus, Taylor, Lincoln Park, Madison Heights, and Ferndale issued between 50 and 75 traffic tickets per every 100 residents . These tickets disproportionately target poor and Black drivers. This profiling is particularly pronounced in historically white suburbs, where racial profiling helps to maintain decades-old patterns of segregation.
Because the police have wide discretion to stop whomever they want with little to no oversight, and because the law establishes barriers to driving legally for low-income and predominantly Black Detroiters, police profiling based on race and class follows . And when these drivers are ticketed, they are often denied the opportunity to contest or handle their tickets through the appropriate legal channels, pushing them deep into a web of debt , debt which has been shown to cause personal bankruptcies.
Discretion to Discriminate
Many Americans see the traffic stop as a benign fact of life. “If you’re not a person of color and not obviously poor, you likely have an entirely different experience with traffic stops,” observes Dr. Sarah Seo, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iowa and the author of Policing the Open Road . “We all get pulled over at some point, so it makes it harder for people with privilege to understand how different the outcomes can be.” While the expectation to obey traffic laws is universal, the reality is that enforcement is profoundly unequal.
"I get so nervous when I see police cars. I’m like, oh God. I instantly started praying. I look in my purse to see if I have sleeping meds with me, Benadryl or something. Because I’m not going to be awake through this process [of going to jail]. I’m sorry, I did drive, but I was only driving to, you know, try and get my kids to school or get to work. I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s just, it’s difficult and I don’t know how I will get [my license]." - DJC client (February 2020)