Responding to longstanding complaints of racial disparities in traffic enforcement, some Montgomery County, Md., legislators are getting serious about the prospect of transferring traffic enforcement from police to other agencies, the Washington Post reports. County Executive Marc Elrich said he is “more than concerned” about the racial inequities in traffic enforcement, which include police stops in Bethesda seven times higher for Black drivers than whites and car searches countywide that were twice as frequent.
County officials said the first step would be to shift speeding and red-light camera enforcement away from the police, if allowed by state law, while evaluating what other functions civilians could perform. As communities nationwide confront calls to “defund” and “unbundle” the police in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Berkeley City Council in California voted last month to move enforcement of minor traffic violations into a new Department of Transportation. Officials in Cambridge, Mass., and St. Louis Park, Minn., are weighing similar legislation. In Maryland’s Montgomery County, an affluent and mostly liberal enclave, the county council banned chokeholds and put more money into a civilian mobile crisis response unit, but stopped short of other budget or operational changes. Lawmakers hope that measures to alleviate “driving while Black” biased enforcement will attract more public support.