Nicholas Bowser outside his Oklahoma City home, Okla., Wednesday, July 14, 2021. (Nick Oxford/The New York Times).
Harold Brown's contribution to the local Treasury began in the same way as many others in Valley Brook, Oklahoma. A police officer noticed that his license plate had lost its light.
I was pulled over. Brown, a security officer, stated that he was heading home at 1:30 a.m. after returning from work. It was enough to express his anger. Brown was yelled at by the officer, who ordered him to get out of his car and threw the body to the ground.
Brown spent the night in jail, with blood running down his face and hands, until he finally reached the bottom of the matter. Valley Brook demanded $800 in fees and fines. This was only a fraction of what the town of 870 residents collects annually from traffic cases.
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The United States police force employs hidden financial incentives to ensure that motorists are safe. This encourages some communities to use armed officers to search for violations which are not related to public safety. Driving is a common daily activity in which drivers are often shot, stun-armed, beaten, or arrested for minor offenses.
Some of these encounters, such as those with Sandra Bland and Walter Scott, have become well-known and helped to create a national uproar over race and policing. The New York Times identified over 400 other instances in which officers killed civilians unarmed while they were not being pursued for violent crimes.
The federal government is a major contributor to the culture of traffic stopping. They issue more than $600million a year in highway safety grants, which subsidize ticket writing. Federal officials claim they don't impose quotas but at least 20 states have assessed police performance on traffic stops per hour. This is a criticism because it contributes to overpolicing, erosion of trust and the erosion of community trust, especially among certain racial groups.
Continue the story
Many cities across the country depend heavily on ticket revenues and court fees to fund government services. Some have outsized police departments to generate that money. A review of hundreds of audit reports, town budgets and state highway records revealed that many of these documents were based on hundreds of municipalities.
This is, for most of the time, not a big city phenomenon. Chicago is a big city that has a long history of collecting millions from motorists. However, the towns most dependent on this revenue have fewer then 30,000 residents. An analysis of census data revealed that more than 730 municipalities depend on fees and fines for at least 10%. This is enough to fund a whole police force in small towns.
The Times looked at three states, Oklahoma, and Virginia, where traffic stops by police have been controversial, to show how ticket revenue can influence traffic enforcement. The result is a complex web of contradictions and conflicts that often go unacknowledged, or not explained.
The Money Machine
Newburgh Heights is a frail industrial village with 2,000 inhabitants, located just south of Cleveland. It covers approximately a half-square mile and monitors traffic along the narrow stretch of Interstate 77.
The 21 officers are positioned on the Harvard Avenue overpass and in a folding chair by the highway to search for cars.
In 2019, $3 million was earned from traffic citations. This revenue typically makes up more than half of the town's budget. Some of this money is processed by the Newburgh Heights Mayors Court. This is one of 286 anachronistic courts that still exist, most of them in small towns across Ohio.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio's 2019 report found that one in six traffic tickets issued in Ohio were issued by towns with mayors courts. This quasi-judicial system, according to the ACLU, is a shadowy and unaccountable that extracts revenue from drivers.
Mayors courts have been a source of ongoing controversy due to their fixation on revenue. After years of complaints about Linndale, a 160-person town, making as much as $1,000,000 annually from speed traps, it was decided to ban mayors courts in towns with less than 200 residents.
Trevor Elkins, Newburgh Heights' mayor, stated that his town's increased use of cameras has decreased the need for traffic stops. However, state data shows that they remain high.
Although public statements by mayors claim that their courts do not generate income, privately, this is what they are concerned about. According to state records, the mayor's court in Bratenahl on Lake Erie has twice as many traffic cases per year than residents.
Bratenahl has a population of approximately 1,300 and is 83% white. It employs its 18 officers to patrol the area of Interstate 90 which borders the town's border of Cleveland, where half of the residents are Black. Bratenahl's mayor's court is a predominantly Black area.
Mayor John Licastro stated that officers were following the law.
He said that we don't choose who drives the Shoreway.
Elkins also offered a defense of Newburgh Heights. There, Black residents make up about 22% of the total population and are often a majority in his mayors court. A Times analysis of over 4,000 traffic tickets found that 76% of the license and insurance violations were committed by Black motorists. 63% of speeding cases were also reported by this newspaper.
Public Safety and Profiteering
Charles J. Hanger, Oklahoma State Trooper, made one of the most well-known of road stops on April 19, 1995.
Hanger noticed a 1977 Mercury Grand Marquis without a license plate while heading north on I-35. Timothy McVeigh, the driver of the vehicle, was driving it. He had just 90 minutes before detonated an explosive truck outside the Oklahoma City Federal Building, killing 168 people.
Police officers consider McVeigh a myth. It is their go-to response to concerns that traffic stops can be used as pretexts to raise revenue or search for evidence of other crimes. Researchers and former police chiefs claim that hundreds of innocent motorists are put under unnecessary scrutiny, expense, and danger for each lucky break.
Valley Brook, Oklahoma collected over $100,000 in tickets for defective equipment such as Browns burnt-out tag lights. On average, citations were issued almost every day.
The majority of stops in this small town, measuring less than half a square mile, are along a four-lane highway. Valley Brook receives 72% of its revenue from fines, which is the highest in the state.
Chief Michael A. Chief Michael A. Stamp supported the police department practices. Stamp said that because their jurisdiction is limited to one block of the main road, officers are able to look for broken taillights and wide turns in order to catch more serious offenses.
Stamp stated that I send officers out on the streets every night to enforce drug and alcohol laws because it is such a serious problem here. Stamp acknowledged the town's dependence on traffic tickets but said, "I will stand by the fact, that what I am doing here also saves life."
Nicholas Bowser (38), is, by some measures, exactly the type of driver that the chief wants to see on the roads. Instead of pulling over at midnight on July 2, he led officers in a chase from Valley Brook to his residence, about one mile away. The police discovered a handgun at his feet after he surrendered and realized that his blood alcohol content was higher than the legal limit.
This might have been enough for Bowser to stop driving for a time or to have a court-ordered air quality monitor installed in his truck. He returned his truck to the impound the following day. He only had to pay $2,185.11 in fees and fines to Valley Brook.
He was charged by local police with negligent driving and public drunkenness, both lesser offenses than driving drunk. The case must be transferred to district courts. Lawyers claim that a 2016 law to prevent repeat drunken-driving offenders from remaining hidden in local courts systems has encouraged towns to reduce offenses and keep the ticket and the revenue.
Bowser stated in an interview that he should have been charged with DUI. Valley Brook dropped the charges against Bowser and reimbursed him about $2,000.
The details of Brown's case were revealed and those charges were dropped. Stamp was also disciplined, and he called to apologize. Brown sued the city, claiming that traffic enforcement has become a profitable business.
He said they were lawless.
A Culture of Quotas
Police in Windsor, Virginia pepper-sprayed Caron Nazario (Black and Latino Army lieutenant) last December after he was caught violating a license plate. The incident made national headlines in April. Officials dismissed one officer involved in the case and called it an aberration. The traffic stop was routine in many aspects.
Windsor is one of almost 100 Virginia communities that have received federal grants to encourage tickets. State authorities awarded $1 million in drunken driving enforcement grants to Fairfax County last year. The grant amount ranged from $900 to Exmore village for nabbing seatbelt scofflaws up to $1,000,000 to Fairfax County. Windsor received $15,750 to help speeders.
It is clear that these grants have an impact on the frequency and economics of traffic stops.
Jessica Cowardin, spokesperson for Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles said that the number of traffic tickets is only one of the many factors we consider when evaluating the effectiveness of grants.
A review of state grant applications revealed that traffic stops are a common performance indicator.
There is very little evidence to show that ticket-writing by police has contributed to reducing fatal car accidents, despite the billions of dollars spent.
There were 33,244 fatalities in 2019 nationwide, an increase of 30,296 from 2010. Experts in traffic safety say that while targeted enforcement is effective, improvements in automobile technology, highway engineering, and other technological advancements have contributed to much of the improvement since the 1970s and 1980s when fatal crashes regularly exceeded 40,000 annually.
Some states and municipalities are changing their approaches to traffic stops in the wake of George Floyd's protests. Berkeley, California has suggested that police enforcement be replaced by an unarmed civilian corps. Virginia legislators prohibited stopping vehicles because they had defective taillights, tinted windows or loud exhaust.
Windsor was forced to take action after the Nazario incident. They used electronic signs and rumble strips to slow down traffic and reduce citizen contact. Windsor police announced that they had stopped funding grant-funded patrols. They said it was in our best interests and the community.
The town council presented a budget for the next fiscal year. It projected revenue increases from all major sources, except traffic fines.
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