The Kansas City traffic stop
The gift that keeps on giving...
As regular readers might already know I spent part of the summer reading every Malcolm Gladwell book and one of them was Talking to Strangers – a 379-page explanation of how and why we misunderstand each other.
In that book Gladwell has a chapter called Case Study: The Kansas City Experiments which I was surprised to learn did not examine how much Bar-B-Que a middle-aged man could eat without having his heart explode like a burrito left too long in a microwave, which was OK with me because I didn’t want Malcolm horning in on my area of expertise.
And so far the answer is: “Quite a bit.”
Instead of that BBQ-Exploding-Heart thing, The Kansas City Experiments took a look at our local police department and its attempts to figure out the best way to deploy police officers: should they put them in patrol cars and have them drive around the city randomly or assign them to specific locations?
Reader’s Digest version (which assumes you’re old enough to get that reference):
They brought in some outside experts to give them advice, which people at the top tend to do when they need someone to blame if-and-when the shit hits the fan, which is a jaded point of view, but that’s what paying attention will do for you.
At the Kansas City Star we occasionally brought in experts who didn’t live here and had never worked in journalism to tell us what to do, which seemed just a tiny little bit like asking members of Greenpeace how to conduct the Normandy Invasion.
But as so often happens, I digress.
Turned out it didn’t make much difference what the police did – crime stayed about the same – which nobody wanted to believe because everyone had their pet theories on how to stop crime including encouraging Batman to move to their cities by giving him a tax break on his Bat Cave, a fact I just made up, but nevertheless, sound like something our city council would do.
(Hey, if it works for corporations, maybe it would work for superheroes…and, Spiderman, if you’re reading this, give our mayor a call.)
After hearing there just wasn’t all that much they could do about crime, everybody threw up their hands and decided we were all Going to Hell in a Handbasket which sounds like a heavy metal album by Ozzy Osbourne which I would never listen to even if it actually existed.
All this cop-angst took place in the early 1970s and still needing a scapegoat in the 1990s, the KC police decided to try getting more advice from yet another criminologist and his name was Lawrence Sherman.
Sherman decided to focus on guns which he believed was fueling the “epidemic of violence” a position the NRA would quibble with because they think the answer to everything is more guns, so I’m kinda surprised they haven’t advocated handing out guns to everyone boarding an airplane which was one of Archie Bunker’s ideas back when All In the Family was still on TV.
An idea so ridiculous that it was played for laughs back then, but is the current NRA position on school shootings.
Another pertinent fact worth knowing
According to Talking to Strangers, multiple studies have shown that a huge percentage of crime in all types of cities originate from just a few streets and blocks, so why put a lot of cops in an area where there isn’t much crime and the Kansas City experiment decided to focus on a single neighborhood bounded on the south by 39th street and the west by Highway 71.
(No word on what the northern and eastern boundaries were, but Gladwell says the area was “0.64 square-mile neighborhood” so I’m guessing it didn’t include West St. Louis and South Des Moines.)
The neighborhood in question had a homicide rate twenty times the national average, one violent felony a day and 24-drive-by shootings a year.
The police tried several tactics; visiting homes to ask for cooperation (which didn’t work because law-abiding people had sealed up their homes like they were the last residents of the Alamo and didn’t have much idea what was happening on the street) and trying to spot concealed weapons (apparently you walk kinda funny if you have a 9-millimeter shoved down the crack of your ass), but nothing worked until they hit on the idea of using traffic stops to search for weapons.
And this is where things got funky.
A lesson in the limits of the U.S. Constitution
The Constitution protects us from “unreasonable searches and seizure” in our homes, which is why police have to get a warrant if they want to go through your underwear drawer and find the sex toys you break out on your anniversary and have to be somewhat inebriated to suggest using.
But if you’re in your car the standard for searching your vehicle drops way down and the police can use just about any pretext to pull you over and then decide you might be armed or dangerous and search your vehicle.
In that KC neighborhood, the police had two patrol cars with four cops conducting aggressive traffic stops and those two cars and four cops cut gun crimes in half. In just 200 days the four cops in the two cars handed out 1,090 traffic citations, made 948 vehicle stops, 616 arrests and seized 29 guns.
In 1991 the New York Times ran a front-page story on what happened in Kansas City and Larry Sherman said over the next few days 300 police departments from around the country called up to ask how he’d done it, and pretty soon everyone everywhere started conducting aggressive traffic stops.
How things went south
So now law enforcement had a traffic-stop chubbie and they started using aggressive traffic stops everywhere – not just high-crime neighborhoods – and this led to cops nit-picking every little thing to have an excuse to stop “suspicious” motorists.
Failure to signal, improperly placed license plates, expired registration, non-compliant headlights, minor speeding violations, improper reflective tape, failure to wear a seat belt – anything and everything would do as an excuse and then they’d assume the worst about the people they stopped.
Plus: a “suspicious” motorist could be a White person in a Black neighborhood (obviously there to buy drugs) or a Black person in a White neighborhood (obviously there to commit a burglary) or a Black person driving too nice a car (obviously a drug dealer) or a Black person doing just about anything else a White cop didn’t like.
Apparently, food wrappers on a car’s floor were interpreted as a sign of drug dealing because those food wrappers meant the person had to eat in their car to protect the drugs that were obviously hidden somewhere in their vehicle, which also means I’m a drug kingpin because whenever I drive to St. Louis I stop at a McDonald’s about halfway there and eat while I’m driving because I’d rather be 20 minutes closer to St. Louis than spend 20 minutes getting depressed in a small-town McDonald’s dining room.
But enough about me and my biased opinions of what it must be like to live in a small town in the Midwest where McDonald’s is the best dining option.
Anyway…
Police officers were encouraged to “go beyond the ticket.”
In other and more accurate words: find an excuse to stop somebody and then find something else they could be charged with. Police officers were also encouraged to stop everyone because they didn’t want to be accused of racial bias or profiling. Rule of thumb: if you’re going to be a dick, be a dick to everyone, which probably ought to replace “Protect and Serve” as some police departments’ motto.
They were also encouraged to draw out the traffic stops with questions like:
1. “So where are you going tonight?”
2. “Been drinking tonight?”
3. “How many bodies in the trunk?”
Because maybe the person being stopped might exhibit suspicious behavior like getting nervous because the answer to those three questions are:
1. “The river.”
2. “Ask a foolish question.”
3. “Just the one.”
And getting nervous would give the cops an excuse to search their cars.
(I found a 2019 story about a court ruling that said police cannot extend a traffic stop without “reasonable suspicion” so now we get into what’s “reasonable” and “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” which there’s no way of knowing unless you also know what dance they’re doing and if it’s Standard White Guy dancing in which we move as little as possible so we don’t reveal we have no rhythm and possibly no soul, it’s going to be a much different number than angels doing the jitterbug like Donald O’Connor in a 1950s movie and if you’re saying, “but Donald O’Connor was a White Guy” remember that’s when they gave Hollywood actors “pep” pills so they could make 17 movies in a single week. Give me a handful of amphetamines and I’d dance my ass off, too.)
And now that I’m done making up stories about Donald O’Connor…
I don’t know about you, but I get nervous anytime a cop stops me because I know all the stuff I did and never got caught for and if cops stop people to give them a free pony or tickets to a ballgame or the Collected Works of ZZ Top, I’ve yet to hear about it.
Generally speaking: traffic stop = bad.
All of which helps explains an awful lot about what has gone wrong between the police and communities they theoretically serve.
In conclusion…
At this point it seems like a pretty good idea for me to say I don’t think all traffic stops are bad, but like just about anything else carried to an extreme point you can get some bad consequences which I’m in the process of proving with Kansas City BBQ.
The main reason I’m writing about this is Malcolm Gladwell made a very good point which maybe we ought to think about.
When a traffic stop goes south we often think the cop is a bad apple, but in many cases the cops are trained to react that way: find an excuse to pull people over, then be a dick and assume the worst.
And if most of the traffic stops that go south involve people with the same color skin as you and that skin isn’t a Whiter Shade of Pale, you might be pretty goddamn suspicious of the police and stay on high alert anytime you get stopped for an improperly displayed license plate.
I never liked the “defund the police” slogan because it sounds crazy (like we’re not going to have cops) and is also misleading because when you talk to the people advocating it they usually explain what they really mean is “reorganize the police” or “retrain the police” which a lot of us wouldn’t mind seeing.
And if you read Talking to Strangers, you now know why.