Traffic Stops Aren't The Same For All, Which Is Part of America's Problem

This past weekend I had an encounter with the police.

No, I wasn’t protesting the death of George Floyd. Instead, I was approximately 25 miles away from the area in Chicago where protests occurred, sitting in a Mercedes-AMG, surgical mask on, while a very polite police officer (also masked) wrote me up for violating the speed limit.

I’d gone to my favorite back road – Chicagoans, especially North Shore residents, know well the ravine along Sheridan Road – to test this AMG. I’d be heading home with some unexpected paperwork.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about this. As much as we value transparency here at TTAC, getting a ticket isn’t worth a post, usually, for the simple reason that unless the encounter with the police or the violation itself is unusual, it’s a pretty boring story. Car enthusiast and auto journalist violates speed limit, doesn’t see cop quickly enough, and soon after owes a municipality some money. Yawn.

The only way this particular encounter was interesting is that I was a few ticks of the speedo from being in deeper trouble, but that’s a story for another time. Because of this, I did have some thoughts about writing a treatise about speeding, unnecessarily low speed limits, and a certain Illinois law that seems too stringent, and I still might, if I can organize those jumbled thoughts. But that’s not why I write this post.

I broke the law, I was stopped, I’ll pay the fine and do the traffic school, and life will move on. Speeding tickets are an occupational hazard, and even before I became an auto journalist, I already possessed a leaden foot. Given how often I’ve been stopped (I even managed to be nabbed twice on the same weekend, on the same road, during one particularly bad weekend in my mid-20s. Who knew ’97 Accord coupes drew the eyes of fuzz?), I apparently also lack eyesight good enough to spot the black and whites. Maybe I need to re-invest in a radar detector.

What got to me was what happened later in the day. Back at home, I flicked on CNN. Soon I saw mayhem in parts of many major cities, including Chicago, where I live. Just four or five miles from where I’m typing this, police and protesters were clashing. Even now, as I write this on Sunday afternoon, the nearest southbound entrance to Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive is blocked off. A curfew has been added to the waning days of our citywide shelter-in-place order.

As I’ve processed the reasons behind the protest, I’ve thought about the all the times I’ve been stopped for driving too fast, or the one time I blanked out and blew through a stop sign on the way to work at a previous job, or even the time I got stopped in college because the Chicago police were looking for an alleged rapist who drove a similar car.

Never, in all those times, have I feared that things would go bad. I never feared I’d be beaten up, or worse. Only once was my car ever searched for contraband (I authorized it, knowing I was clean, and being too young and naïve to realize that cops sometimes do plant drugs). Eighty percent of the time, perhaps even 90 percent, the cops were polite and professional. When they weren’t, they were simply a bit rude and maybe lectured me for speeding.

Even when I was pulled over on that rape suspect mix-up, the cops were fine. They immediately knew I wasn’t their guy – the suspect they were looking for was a little older, Hispanic, and drove a four-door Grand Am (while mine had just two) – and after a quick scan of my info, I was let go with no drama. If any gun was drawn, I never saw it in the dark.

I’ve thought about this before, but it’s amazing to think that my lack of fear is because of the color of my skin. Sure, other factors may play a part – I’ve generally been stopped in low-crime areas, and I’ve often been driving cars that are brand new and sometimes marked with manufacturer plates – but I don’t know the fear that others do.

I realize there are plenty of good cops, and these incidents make up a fraction of encounters with cops, and that sometimes deadly force is justified. Those caveats aside, it’s completely understandable why high-profile incidents like this would lead people who look like George Floyd or Eric Garner to have a fear of the police that I don’t have. Not to mention all the minor incidents that don’t rise to the level of media attention, or the other underlying socioeconomic factors at play.

Yeah, Floyd was arrested for allegedly passing a counterfeit bill, not speeding. I get that. But other people of color have ended up dead after a traffic stop. The circumstances around Floyd’s death may not have involved a traffic stop, but the issues at hand are the same. In fact, the pent-up anger behind these protests comes in part because nothing changed after the incidents that involved traffic stops.

Others don’t have that lived experience, and we need to keep that in mind in the days and weeks going forward, as we debate and discuss what’s happened to this country over the past week.

Some of you are going to hop to the comments and yell at me for being political. Don’t. Acknowledging that the police have killed minorities is not political, it’s a fact. Police have killed white men and women, too. That’s also a fact. Acknowledging that some people have an uneasy relationship with police due to the color of their skin isn’t political. It’s a fact. Acknowledging that a traffic stop is much scarier for some folks than others isn’t political, it’s a fact.

Debating what to do about it is political. Debating about the agendas of some of the folks who were part of the protests is political. You’ll find well-written words about such things elsewhere, in media outlets across the political spectrum. Go there and read those words. I won’t go in that direction here. And please, take it easy in the comments. Our mods don’t need to deal with flame wars.

You may also ask what this has to do with cars. The answer is, not a ton. I’ll grant that. But we’re all enthusiasts on staff, and most of you readers are, too. Even if you’re not an enthusiast and Google brought you here because of a review, well, you drive. If you’re reading this site, you drive. And you probably get pulled over every so often, because it happens to even the most cautious driver. We all occasionally lose sight of the speed limit.

And that’s the thing. For some of us, it’s not a fraught experience. It’s annoying and you get a bit upset, maybe feel a little guilty, but you live. You pay the fine, do what you can to keep your record and insurance from taking too much damage, and you move on. Eventually, the stop and the ticket become just another bad memory.

But for many of us, it’s so much more. It’s frightening. They might not end up dead, but it’s happened to enough people who look like them that it fills them with fear.

Yes, cops have a dangerous job. A routine traffic stop could be dangerous for them, too. And yes, many if not most cops are good people — competent, and not racist. Yet just enough bad apples exist that the whole bunch becomes rotten in the eyes of some.

Our country is going through a turbulent time. No matter where you land politically, or what you look like, you should at least understand why.

And the next time you’re fuming because you have to pay a hefty fine for speeding, keep some perspective. Your anger may be justified, but if you didn’t feel fear because of how you look, you’ve had it relatively easy.

Some of us pay for breaking the law with our credit cards and checkbooks. Some of us pay for it with our lives. Remember which is which.

[Image: vchal/Shutterstock]