Iftar, or breaking fast, is more than pita and hummus.
The month of Ramadan begins today and Muslims will spend the next four weeks fasting and dedicating time to worship. But even though most Muslims will abstain from eating or drinking between dawn and dusk, this doesn’t make food any less important. In fact, the process of deciding what to eat for iftar — the meal that breaks the day’s fast — can be long and complicated, especially when coupled with midday cravings and coffee-withdrawal headaches.
But what Muslims eat during Ramadan, and how, goes beyond the stereotypical imagery of a family eating from a communal platter of rice and meat.
A Google search for “Ramadan food” will likely result in images of samosas or recipes for lentil soup, which can offer an unnecessarily narrow view of who Muslims are and the dishes they like to cook and eat. While many Muslims worldwide do eat these foods, and most adhere to the halal dietary standard — meaning foods that are religiously permissible; for instance, pork and alcohol are not — Ramadan cuisine has no boundaries and brings up a larger issue of inclusivity in Muslim American communities.
A common misconception is that the Muslim faith is synonymous with Arab or South Asian cultures. But while people who are originally from the Middle East-North Africa region do contribute to the largest percentage of Muslim Americans, almost 30 percent of Muslims in the US are Asian, while one-fifth are Black.
It goes without saying that these people represent many cultures, traditions, and cuisines, all of which they incorporate into religious events. So even though mosque events may overwhelmingly serve hummus and pita bread, this isn’t representative of the people who go to consume it.
This is something that Nazima Qureshi, a practicing nutritionist and co-founder of the Healthy Muslims, has noticed. “[Religious] communities are created by the stakeholders at that mosque and a lot of times, unfortunately, it’s a very ethnic base, so you’ll have the South Asian-led mosques and the Middle Eastern mosques,” Qureshi told Vox.
This leadership plays a big role in the decision-making and tends to exclude people from cultures that have less concentrated Muslim populations, something that Qureshi thinks should change. “Muslims come from so many different cultures,” she said, “so as a nutritionist, I try to incorporate a lot of different flavors to accurately reflect the Muslim community.”
Qureshi said that many of her Muslim clients feel like they have to give up their cultural food in order to eat healthy, so she tries to reverse this perspective by celebrating what her clients (literally) bring to the table.
In my family, for example, Ramadan is a time to experiment with the vast array of dishes in our family cookbooks. I come from a mixed North African, Pakistani, and Quebecois background, so Wednesday’s iftar could be a tajine stew while on Thursday we might have chicken korma.
I talked to three Muslim Americans, who value their cultural cuisines as well as their faith, about how their intersecting identities are reflected in the ways they observe Ramadan. Their stories have been edited and condensed.
Sahla Denton, 21, Cottage Grove, Oregon
I’m half Mexican, half Jamaican, and I grew up with both of those cultures equally. But I’m also Muslim, which has a big influence on my family’s lifestyle. Since we’re from such different ethnic backgrounds, we don’t have a lot of traditions that other Muslim families have, so we’ve made a lot of our own.
One thing we’ve had to do in general is adapt our traditional dishes because there are a lot of Mexican and Jamaican dishes that aren’t initially halal. For example, Mexicans use a lot of pork fat, so we have to alter even the regular beans and rice. A lot of Jamaican cakes use rum, so we’ve had to find ingredients that balance the sugar other than alcohol. Our non-Muslim extended family has also adapted to us — like now all our aunties know how to make dishes that are good for us to eat, and it’s brought us together a lot more. One of our family’s staple dishes, that we’ll definitely be eating this Ramadan, is escovitch, which is a Jamaican dish made of fish and topped with onions, carrots, and bell peppers tossed in vinegar.
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Courtesy of Sahla Denton
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Courtesy of Sahla Denton
As Muslims, we believe in taking care of the land, animals, and plants we benefit from, which was one of the values we’ve had since starting our family farm. We produce most of the food we eat, and if we have anything extra, we try to redistribute that.
In fact, since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been an active food pantry in town where a lot of local farmers donate extra produce and animal products. My dad and I were some of the first volunteers to stock the pantry with milk and eggs from our farm animals when it opened. We will definitely continue doing that this year during Ramadan, and then once we start harvesting, we’ll have produce to give as well.
One of my favorite Ramadan memories was when I was little and we used to go to the mosque for iftar. It would be me and my friend, and we’d have to help the little kids serve their food, and so I remember going back and forth to the food line so many times, but it was a lot of fun. The food was all really good because it was usually a potluck, so there was Mexican food, there was Pakistani food, there was food from all over the place on one table.
Dawood Yasin, 51, Berkeley, California
Ramadan, for me, is proximity to God through subtraction to make space for addition. And so the subtraction obviously is food, and the addition is worship. This Ramadan I’m hoping to experiment with a simple diet, where I will break my fast with dates and bone broth, but I still love to cook.
My family originated from the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal, and we have our traditional foods like jag (beans and rice). But over the past two years I’ve been putting energy and intentionality into American barbecue. On the 17th of April, it will be 25 years since I converted to Islam, and for most of that time I wasn’t able to eat barbecue because no one made it halal. You’re not going to see an iftar in the mosque where they’re serving barbecued chicken and cornbread. It’s biryani and kebabs, you know, Mediterranean or South Asian cuisine. Which is great, I mean, everyone has their own inclination. But I wanted to expose more people to the possibilities of making this cuisine halal, and the response has been incredible.
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Courtesy of Dawood Yasin
I see food as an expression of love to my family. Because if I love you, then I’m going to ensure that the best form of protein, vegetables, and food in general, is what I’m serving you. And if that means I have to go get it myself I will. I’ve spent full weeks at a time bow-hunting on backcountry trails and trekking through mountains to fish. I started this hashtag on social media #getyourownhalal, which to me is the coupling of being outdoors and getting the best food for your health.
I actually don’t see a separation between wellness and religion. When I look at religiosity, I see it as a lifestyle, so there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two: If I’m unhealthy, I can’t worship properly. When I was 45 years old, I had a knee injury and I couldn’t prostrate to complete the Muslim prayer for six months. I had to pray in a chair during that time and I thought to myself, imagine if this was a perpetual state? I missed prostrating and putting my head onto the ground, and I knew that if my lifestyle was ever the cause of restricting my worship, I would have to address it. One of the aims and purposes of Islam is preservation of life, because there can be no preservation of religion if there is no life.
Seba Ismail, 19, Boston, Massachusetts
I have a really big sweet tooth, so my favorite Ramadan dishes are desserts. We’re Egyptian, so my mom makes atayef, which is a sweet dumpling filled with cream, and we only have them during Ramadan because my mom says she wants us to savor it more and really appreciate it. I used to beg her to make them for my birthday and she would always say “no, you gotta wait until Ramadan,” so as a kid I would always get super excited for when the month started because it was the only time I could eat them.
This year I won’t have that because I’m spending Ramadan on campus in Pennsylvania, and since Ramadan for me has always been so tied to community, I’m kind of excited to experience it by myself. I feel like it’s more of a test for me and my relationship with God. In the past, Ramadan would be my mom telling me to go to the mosque for prayers, or going to iHop for suhoor with my hometown friends, and I feel like I relied on a lot of people for my Ramadan experience. Now it’s just myself, and I don’t really know how to do that, but it’s kind of cool.
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Courtesy of Seba Ismail
My family is Nubian, so growing up I would get a lot of people asking me, “How are you Egyptian, if you’re Black?” And because I don’t wear the hijab, people are also surprised when they find out I’m Muslim. I feel like I had a really big identity crisis that came from a lot of misinformation and ignorance. A lot of people don’t know about the complicated past of colonization in North Africa, or the slavery that happened there, or the displacement of Indigenous groups. I don’t think we talk about the diversity of the Muslim community enough, like the Black Muslim population is huge — 15 percent of the world’s Muslims live in sub-Saharan Africa — but most people don’t know that.
Bucknell University has a primarily white population, so I get a lot of questions about Ramadan and fasting that Muslims joke about but that I’ve never had to answer before, like “You can’t even drink water?” “How does your body survive?” and “Do you just stand outside and like, look at the sun to see when you can eat?” A lot of these people have only ever seen Muslim people on TV, which is kind of shocking to me and frustrating at times. I’m still figuring out how to navigate it.
Growing up, my parents would always tell me, “you’re Egyptian,” and then I go to Egypt and they’re like, “you’re American,” and then in America, they’re like, “you’re neither.” But I think now I’ve found a space in between, where I can be somebody who doesn’t have to fit in one box or the other.
Rogue officers like Derek Chauvin probably won’t be deterred by good law, but excessively vague law encourages bad behavior.
On Wednesday, more than one week into the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd, Chauvin’s lawyer read an excerpt from the department’s manual governing the use of force.
“The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force,” the manual stated, “must be judged from the perspective of the reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”
Minneapolis revised its manual after Floyd’s death to place clearer and tighter constraints on officers engaged in the use of force. But the vague rule laid out in the version of the manual that was in effect during Floyd’s fatal encounter with Chauvin is fairly typical of the guidance provided to officers in the field.
As Sgt. Jody Stiger, a member of the Los Angeles Police Department called by prosecutors in the Chauvin trial, testified, most police departments derive their policies governing the use of force from Graham v. Connor. Graham is a 1989 Supreme Court case that, in the words of scholars Osagie Obasogie and Zachary Newman, “established the modern constitutional landscape for police excessive force claims.”
The language Chauvin’s lawyer read from the police manual was lifted, word for word, from the Court’s decision in Graham.
Authored by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, one of the primary proponents of a tough-on-crime approach that often animated the Court’s decisions during his tenure, the Graham opinion warns that police accused of using excessive force often have to make difficult decisions in highly stressful situations. In determining whether an officer acted reasonably, Rehnquist wrote for his Court, “the calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”
Perhaps even more significantly, Graham left cops with little guidance on just what limits the Constitution places on use of force by police. As then-University of Virginia law professor William Stuntz wrote six years after Graham was handed down, “one searches in vain for any body of case law that gives” Graham’s vague reasonableness standard “some content.”
Yet, while some academics did criticize Graham’s approach early on, many prominent commentators outside of the academy only recently have started to think of Graham as a major wrong turn by the Supreme Court. Though three justices joined a partial dissent by Justice Harry Blackmun that criticized some parts of Rehnquist’s decision, all nine justices agreed with most of Rehnquist’s reasoning. That includes Justice Thurgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights lawyer.
But with the benefit of hindsight — and with the benefit of empirical evidence showing that clear legal rules lead to better policing — Graham now looks like a serious error by the Court. As Rachel Harmon, a law professor at the University of Virginia and author of The Law of the Police, told me in an email, “Graham offers a standard focused on judging the use of force after it has happened,” and it “offers very little guidance to officers and departments about how to use force.”
It does little, in other words, to advise police on how they can avoid conduct that might needlessly injure or kill a criminal suspect.
It’s unlikely that clearer rules would have saved George Floyd’s life. As Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo testified at Chauvin’s trial, Chauvin “absolutely” violated department policy when he knelt on Floyd’s neck after Floyd was already subdued and handcuffed.
But clear rules can ensure that cops tossed into a dangerous and uncertain situation can fall back on those rules, rather than making a potentially deadly decision with only their fear to guide them. As law professors Brandon Garrett and Seth Stoughton wrote in a 2017 article, Graham’s “‘split-second’ approach presents obvious problems from the perspective of law enforcement supervisors, who cannot provide meaningful guidance about or oversight of how officers react in the moment in an objectively reasonable way.”
Graham was correct about one thing. Officers do sometimes find themselves in “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” encounters where they have to make quick decisions about how to use force. But if we want these officers to make the right decision in these fraught moments, police departments need to provide them with clear guidance on how they should react.
And the Supreme Court’s vague “reasonableness” standard does nothing of the sort.
How clear rules can save lives
On a fall night in 1974, Officer Elton Hymon arrived at the scene of an alleged home break-in. He soon found Edward Garner, an eighth-grade boy weighing about 110 pounds, in the backyard of the home. Hymon later admitted that he was “reasonably sure” that Garner was unarmed. Yet, as Garner attempted to climb a fence at the edge of the yard, Hymon shot him in the back of the head and killed him.
Police later found a stolen purse and $10 in Garner’s possession.
The stunning thing about Garner’s death, which formed the basis of the Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee v. Garner (1985), is that Officer Hymon had every reason to believe that he acted lawfully when he killed an unarmed 15-year-old boy who’d committed a fairly minor act of theft.
A Tennessee state law provided that, after an officer notifies a suspect of their intention to arrest the suspect, if “he either flee or forcibly resist, the officer may use all the necessary means to effect the arrest.” In other words, state law clearly permitted police to use deadly force against fleeing felony suspects.
Nor was Tennessee particularly unusual in this regard. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted in her dissenting opinion in Garner, in 1985 “nearly half the States” still followed a “venerable common law rule authorizing the use of deadly force if necessary to apprehend a fleeing felon.” As a 1736 treatise described that common law rule, “it is no felony” for a law enforcement officer to slay a suspect who “shall either resist or fly before they are apprehended.”
Garner, which abandoned that common law rule in a 6-3 decision, represents a “high-water mark” in the Court’s decisions governing use of force by police, according to Garrett and Stoughton. Unlike future decisions like Graham, Garner laid down a fairly clear rule that police could follow when determining whether to use deadly force against a fleeing suspect.
Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force. Thus, if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape, and if, where feasible, some warning has been given.
Under Garner, in other words, police would no longer use their own judgment to decide whether to fire on a fleeing suspect. The Court told police when they could use deadly force — if the suspect “poses a threat of serious physical harm,” if they “threaten[] the officer with a weapon,” or when the suspect “committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm” — and thus informed police that they could not use deadly force against other fleeing suspects.
The impact of Garner on police behavior was swift and dramatic. According to a 1994 study by criminologist Abraham Tennenbaum, homicides committed by police dropped about 16 percent in the nation as a whole after Garner was decided. In states that previously followed the unconstitutional common law rule, “the reduction was approximately twenty-four percent (23.80%).”
A more recent appeals court decision bolsters the proposition that clear legal rules are effective in reducing police violence.
In Estate of Armstrong v. Village of Pinehurst (2016), the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard an allegation that police used excessive force when they repeatedly used a taser to subdue a mentally ill man, who died during his encounter with the police. Though the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the cops, on the theory that the officers were protected under a doctrine known as “qualified immunity,” the court also laid down several limits on the use of tasers by police.
“A police officer may only use serious injurious force, like a taser, when an objectively reasonable officer would conclude that the circumstances present a risk of immediate danger that could be mitigated by the use of force,” Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote for her court. She added that “‘physical resistance’ is not synonymous with ‘risk of immediate danger.’”
The Fourth Circuit oversees federal litigation in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and a 2017 report by Reuters found that eight major cities in those states adopted stricter policies governing the use of tasers by police in the immediate wake of the Armstrong decision. These policies proved very successful in reducing the use of tasers.
In Baltimore, police used Tasers 47 percent fewer times last year than in 2015, according to records reviewed by Reuters. Deployments fell 65 percent in Virginia Beach; 60 percent in Greensboro, North Carolina; 55 percent in Charleston, South Carolina; and 52 percent in Huntington, West Virginia. Norfolk, Virginia, saw deployments plunge 95 percent.
As Professor Harmon told me, cases like Garner and Armstrong demonstrate that “when courts provide clearer guidance, it can make a difference.” Regarding the Armstrong case, Harmon told me that she “would want to know more about what officers used instead of tasers before throwing a victory parade, but it does illustrate the power of the law, when courts actually provide specific and meaningful guidance to the police.”
The Supreme Court moved away from giving clear guidance to police after Garner
The facts of Graham v. Connor are as shocking as the facts are in Garner, even though they did not result in anyone’s death.
Dethorne Graham was a Black man and a diabetic living in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1984, when he felt the beginning of an insulin reaction. Because such a reaction is treated with sugar, Graham asked a friend to drive him to a convenience store so he could buy some orange juice. But when they arrived at the store, there was a long line. Fearing he would not be able to buy the juice fast enough, Graham immediately left and asked his friend to take him to a friend’s house instead.
A police officer witnessed Graham’s very brief visit to the store and deemed it suspicious, because the cop pulled Graham and his friend over and would not let the two men go even after Graham’s friend explained Graham’s medical condition to the cop.
At one point, while Graham was waiting for the officer to let him go, he got out of the car, ran around it twice, and then passed out on the curb. Erratic behavior can be a symptom of a diabetic emergency, but the police apparently took Graham’s behavior as a sign of something sinister. After more officers arrived on the scene, Graham was handcuffed and forced face-down onto the car’s hood. When Graham told the police to check his wallet for a decal indicating that he is diabetic, an officer told him to “shut up.”
They eventually let him go after they received a report that Graham hadn’t done anything wrong at the convenience store.
And yet, despite these disturbing facts, the Supreme Court’s decision emphasized that police must deal with “tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving” situations when they encounter someone like Dethorne Graham.
Graham didn’t say that there are no limits on police conduct. In addition to holding that police must behave as a “reasonable officer” would behave, the Court also listed several factors that lower courts could consider when an officer is accused of excessive force, “including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”
But these were simply factors that could be considered, not bright-line rules that gave clear guidance to police about what kind of conduct is permitted. And the Graham case itself suggests that these factors offer little protection for many victims of excessive force.
After all, Graham himself committed no crime. He posed no threat to anyone, and he neither resisted arrest nor attempted to flee. But the Supreme Court sent his case back down to a trial court for a second hearing, and Graham ultimately lost his case.
One possible explanation for the lopsided vote in the Graham case — again, much of the decision was unanimous — is that the Supreme Court hands down decisions that are intended to be read and applied by lawyers and judges, not by police officers.
Despite Graham’s admonition that judges should evaluate an officer’s conduct without “the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” courts are in the business of hindsight. Lawsuits, by their very nature, do not arise until after an alleged legal violation has occurred. So, when an officer is hauled into Court due to allegations of excessive force, Graham reminds judges that they will probably know more about the circumstances that led to that allegation than the officer reasonably could have known at the time.
Yet, while Graham’s holding may offer a useful reminder to judges, we also know that police departments use decisions like Graham to shape their own policies and training manuals. And the sort of open-ended legal standards that judges are accustomed to applying to individual cases do not provide adequate guidance to police officers. A vague standard may be useful for a judge with a law degree, years of legal experience, and months to study the facts of a particular case. But such standards are inadequate for a cop who, often for the first and only time in their career, is caught in a dangerous situation with their gun drawn.
Nevertheless, since Graham, the Court has only doubled down on its preference for vague, flexible standards over clear legal rules governing police. In Scott v. Harris (2007), for example, the Court ruled in favor of police officers who, during a high-speed chase, rammed a suspect’s car off the road and caused him serious injury.
Yet, rather than evaluating this case under the fairly clear rule laid out in Garner — Garner, after all, was a case about when police can use potentially deadly force against a fleeing suspect — Scott arguably abandoned Garner’s approach altogether. While the fleeing motorist’s “attempt to craft an easy-to-apply legal test in the Fourth Amendment context is admirable,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court, “in the end we must still slosh our way through the factbound morass of ‘reasonableness.’”
“Whether or not Scott’s actions constituted application of ‘deadly force,’” Scalia added, “all that matters is whether Scott’s actions were reasonable.”
As one federal judge wrote just a few months after Scott was decided, under the Scott decision, “there is no Garner bright-line test.” There is only a vague “reasonableness” test.
One major problem with this approach is that it gives virtually no guidance to police departments when they draft their own policies guiding the use of force, and it can lead individual officers to guess what kind of behavior is acceptable if they are in a situation that might require force. As Harmon, the UVA professor, writes, the Supreme Court’s current framework “does not answer adequately the most basic questions about police uses of force: when a police officer may use force against a citizen, how much force he may use, and what kinds of force are permissible.”
Again, it’s unlikely that a more rules-based approach, like the one the Court took in Garner, could have saved George Floyd’s life. Chauvin appears to have shown such extraordinary disregard for his department’s policies that even his own police chief testified against him at his murder trial.
But clear rules can and do save lives. According to Tennenbaum’s study of Garner, that decision “reduced the total number of police homicides by approximately sixty homicides a year.”
That’s 60 people a year who would have died if the Court hadn’t given clear guidance to police officers.
Wright was killed by police just 10 miles away from where Derek Chauvin is on trial for the killing of George Floyd.
The police killing of Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old Black man, following a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, comes as former police officer Derek Chauvin is on trial for the killing of George Floyd roughly 10 miles to the south. Wright’s death, one of more than 260 fatal police shootings that have already happened this year, is yet another reminder of how quickly any police interaction can turn deadly — particularly for Black Americans.
Wright was stopped by police Sunday afternoon; his mother, Katie Wright, said her son called her as the stop was happening in order to ask her about insurance — she says the car had belonged to her, and she’d given it to Wright two weeks prior. His mother also said Wright told her officers informed him he was being stopped because there was an air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. Most “objects suspended between the driver and the windshield,” including air fresheners, are illegal in the state. Police, however, said Monday that Wright was stopped for having expired tags on his car.
Police also say they discovered after they pulled him over that there was a warrant out for Wright’s arrest. Wright’s mother says she heard him being told to exit his vehicle, and that “I heard police officers say, ‘Daunte, don’t run.’”
Police body camera video released Monday afternoon shows Wright outside of the car, with his hands behind his back. As one officer moves to handcuff him, he breaks away, reentering his car. An officer attempts to pull him back out, while the body camera shows an officer aiming a gun at Wright.
That gun discharges; Wright was shot. The car pulls away. The officer with the firearm can be heard saying, “Oh shit, I just shot him.” The chief of police at Brooklyn Center said he believes the shot was an “accidental discharge,” and that, given the officer can be heard yelling “taser” that the officer drew their handgun in error.
Wright died a few blocks away from the shooting after hitting another vehicle. His girlfriend, who needed treatment for non-life-threatening injuries, was in the passenger seat.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension — the law enforcement agency that oversaw the state investigation into George Floyd’s death — has begun a review of the shooting.
“We want justice for Daunte,” Katie Wright said at a memorial following the shooting.
Hundreds of Brooklyn Center residents protested late into the night in demonstrations that culminated in a rally outside of the Brooklyn Center Police Department, which saw protesters demanding accountability as officers pushed them back with flash-bang grenades and tear gas.
Police ultimately declared the rally — which featured some protesters throwing items at armored officers — an unlawful assembly and ordered the crowd to leave or be arrested.
Wright’s mother called on the protesters to be peaceful in their advocacy, saying, “All the violence, if it keeps going it’s only going to be about the violence. We need it to be about why my son got shot for no reason.”
Many parents have asked similar questions. More than 1,127 people were killed by police during 2020, according to Mapping Police Violence. And many of those parents have had Black children; the races of all those killed aren’t known, but of those that are, about 30 percent of those killed were Black.
The knowledge that a disproportionate number of Black Americans are killed by police can make every encounter feel dangerous. At another recent, prominent traffic stop — this one in Virginia — 2nd Lt. Caron Nazario, a Black Latinx man, was confronted by officers who demanded, at gunpoint, that he exit his vehicle.
When Nazario told the officers, “I’m honestly afraid to get out,” one responded, “Yeah, you should be.”
And he should have been.
Wright’s killing, the killing of Philando Castile (who died nearly five years ago not far from where Wright lived his last moments), the arrest and death of Sandra Bland, and the many other Black people killed are testament to the fact that traffic stops are inherently dangerous. And it has reignited debate over just how necessary traffic stops really are.
Traffic stops demonstrate police bias and can be dangerous for Black drivers
As University of Arkansas law professor Jordan Blair Woods wrote in the Michigan Law Review, police, like many Black Americans, are taught to view stops as dangerous — not to those being stopped, but to themselves.
“Police academies regularly show officer trainees videos of the most extreme cases of violence against officers during routine traffic stops in order to stress that mundane police work can quickly turn into a deadly situation if they become complacent on the scene or hesitate to use force,” Woods wrote.
But in a review of Florida’s traffic stop data from 2005 to 2014, Woods found this mindset to be unnecessary. Police, the data showed, had a 1 in 6.5 million chance of being killed during a traffic stop, and a 1 in 361,111 chance of being seriously injured. Overall, 98 percent of stops saw zero or minor injury to officers.
Citizens’ chances of surviving a routine stop with police don’t seem to be quite as good; a 2019 study by Shea Streeter, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan, found that in 2015, about 11 percent of police killings happened at traffic and pedestrian stops nationwide.
Complicating matters for Black individuals is that they appear to be stopped more often than white people — in some localities, by a large margin. The Stanford Open Policing Project, a database of more than 200 million traffic stops, found that in St. Paul, not far from where Wright was killed, Black drivers are a little more than three times more likely than white drivers to be pulled over; in San Jose, California, Black drivers are six times more likely to be stopped.
Arguably, drivers of all races ought to be stopped at about the same rate — failing to signal or missing a sudden change in speed limit would seem to be mistakes anyone could make. This has led to a number of researchers trying to understand this disparity, and, in general, these studies suggest that the issue has to do with officer bias, conscious or unconscious, that casts Black people as inherently more dangerous than their white counterparts.
Tied to this idea is the question of what stops are for. As a group of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Dartmouth College researchers led by UNC political science professor Frank R. Baumgartner wrote in a 2017 paper, in many departments, traffic stops are meant to serve a dual purpose: as a deterrent for the person stopped, and as a chance to do some investigative work for the officer. In many ways, this system is akin to the stop-and-frisk technique, a practice most prominently used in New York City that was meant to uncover criminal behavior through street searches. The program was ruled unconstitutional.
As Baumgartner wrote, “officers are trained to use traffic stops as a general enforcement strategy aimed at reducing violent crime or drug trafficking. When officers are serving these broader goals, they are making an investigatory stop, and these stops have little (if anything) to do with traffic safety and everything to do with who looks suspicious.”
If Black drivers are seen as looking more suspicious and police are trained to view traffic stops as dangerous in general, this creates a serious problem. When a Black driver is stopped, the interaction is more likely to begin with the officer even more on guard for trouble than they might otherwise be.
This can lead to the kind of rapid escalation seen in Nazario’s case, in which officers attempted to manage the stop through violence: first with a weapon and threats, and later with nonlethal force. Body camera footage released during Chauvin’s trial, for example, shows an officer drawing his weapon shortly after approaching Floyd’s vehicle and yelling at him to “Put your fucking hands up right now.”
All of this puts Black drivers in mortal danger. Law enforcement representatives have argued the stops are necessary — “we find drugs, evidence of other crimes … it’s a very valuable tool,” Kevin Lawrence, the Texas Municipal Police Association’s executive director told the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2019 — but those discoveries are rare. Nationally, about 4 percent of stops resulted in arrests in 2015, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
This has a number of activists and elected officials questioning whether the risks traffic stops pose to drivers — particularly Black drivers — are worth such a small number of arrests.
Berkeley, for instance, recently approved a plan to prohibit officers from conducting traffic stops for violations that have nothing to do with safety; Oakland has a similar policy in place. Other places, including Montgomery County, Maryland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, have contemplated such measures as well. Washington, DC, stripped its police department of some of its authority to regulate traffic laws, empowering its transportation department to do enforcement instead. New York’s attorney general has recommended New York City make a similar change.
The long-term effectiveness of such measures remains to be seen. But they represent a step toward reform and a step away from the kind of policing that has left Wright dead.