A deadly drama on Grand Rapids' southeast side escalated swiftly last week. Just 66 seconds elapse between these first and fourth frames from a police video released Wednesday.
Police chiefs in some U.S. cities, including Lansing, no longer encourage -- or even allow -- officers to stop drivers for minor violations unrelated to safety.
That change is aimed at improving community relations and is a reaction to "data showing that minor stops not only disproportionately snare Black drivers, but also do little to combat serious crime or improve public safety," The New York Times says Friday in Michigan-related coverage.
Some [minor stops] escalate into avoidable violence, even killing officers or drivers.
The latest example is the death in Grand Rapids of Patrick Lyoya, an unarmed 26-year-old Black man who was pulled over for a mismatched license plate and, after a brief struggle, was apparently shot in the head from behind, according to videos released on Wednesday. An hour away in Lansing, new rules seek to prevent such deadly encounters. ...
Police chiefs and criminologists say the rule changes amount to the first major reconsideration of traffic policing since the early 1980s, when rising crime rates, a shift toward more proactive policing and the advent of squad car computers for checking driver records helped make pretextual stops a cornerstone of enforcement.
Step 1 for any traffic stop is in this caption of a Grand Rapids' officer speaking to Patrick Lyoya on April 4. (Photo: Grand Rapids Police Department video)
In Lansing, Police Chief Daryl Green issued revised guidelines in July 2020 that are aimed at "eliminating any aspect, inferred or otherwise, of bias-based traffic policing practices," as reported by The State News, a Michigan State student newspaper. Officers no longer can stop drivers solely for a secondary violation, such as cracked windshields, loud exhaust, burned-out license plate lamp, cracked tail lights, dangling ornaments and tinted windows.
Green also states that indiscriminate use of the Law Enforcement Information Network (LEIN) to scan license plates without an articulable and non-bias public safety reason is prohibited. ...
"This change is based on input and feedback from residents about what they want from their police department," [Mayor Andy] Schor said. "Lansing will be one of the first communities in the state of Michigan to take this action. It is a major step in ensuring that we have fair and impartial policing here in Lansing."
In its new look at the issue, The Times reports:
Los Angeles last month became the biggest city to restrict the policing of minor violations. In Philadelphia, a ban on such stops has just taken effect.
Pittsburgh; Seattle; Berkeley, Calif.; ... Brooklyn Center, Minn.; and the State of Virginia have all taken similar steps. Elsewhere across the country, a half-dozen prosecutors have said they will not bring charges based on evidence collected at these stops. ...
"Never before have government officials, policymakers or prosecutors tried to limit how police officers use traffic stops in their investigatory role — in fact, historically, making these stops was encouraged," said Sarah A. Seo, a Columbia University law professor who studies traffic stops. "These new policies may be turning the tide."
There's law encorcement pushback, predictably:
Some police unions and officers are fighting the new rules, arguing that pulling over cars to search them is an essential weapon against serious crime. ...
Defenders of pretextual stops also note that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the tactic a quarter-century ago.
Friday's article is the paper's latest on the topic since a lengthy front-page report nearly six months ago:
A New York Times investigation last fall revealed that in the previous five years police officers pulling over cars had killed more than 400 motorists who were neither wielding a gun or knife nor under pursuit for a violent crime — a rate of more than one a week.
Police culture and court precedents significantly overstated the danger to officers, encouraging aggression in the name of self-defense and impunity from prosecutors and juries, the investigation found.
Patrick Lyoya is survived by two daughters, five younger siblings and his parents. (Photo: Blondine Lyoya)
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