Sure they do. They’re still getting the broken taillight fine after the cop searches the car.
Such actions are most emphatically NOT pointless, they are preventative: informing someone that their bad behaviour is noticed is often enough to keep well-meaning citizens on the right side of the law. What's your proposed alternative? That every interaction with the police must result in a fine?
The problem is selective enforcement. And let's face the truth: most laws are enforced only against minorities, or as someone else put it shortly:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Hell, just look at the marijuana prohibition, it was explicitly done to be able to criminalize lefties and Black persons [1].
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
So cops are just stopping drivers and giving them warnings. It sounds like harassment to me.
in the case of i stopped you because -rear lights, i see noone else has a notation on your marker, go get it repaired, right now...then your free to go,
thats how i generally see a traffic stop actually being a traffic stop.
Sounds quite logical to me that they'd spend the largest amount of time and resources on that.
Naively, forcing cops to apply the law even more strictly and always issue fines for minor violations, is not something we want, is it?
The 79% on traffic stops is an officer acting on what they classified to be a traffic violation -- it's not 79% of them are pretextual stops & warnings, and 11% are catching speeders/reckless drivers... it's 79% pulling over speeders/reckless/etc. drivers and 11% "reasonable suspicion of a crime that is not traffic related"
If you think about it that way... People CONSANTLY violate traffic laws... So it's not terribly surprising. I certainly hope calls for help are promptly answered, but that source doesn't seem to include data other than the fact that responding to calls for help takes twice as long as a traffic stop for an officer's time.
[In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.
In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion.
Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action].
[0] The report was published Oct. 25 by advocacy group Catalyst California and the ACLU of Southern California. It relies on county budgets' numbers and new policing data provided under the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which took effect in 2019.
[1] Report https://catalyst-ca.cdn.prismic.io/catalyst-ca/126c30a8-852c...