The Fresh Prince Project by Chris Palmer

Author:Chris Palmer [Palmer, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

“When Was the Last Time You Smoked Weed?”

In October 2021, Philadelphia’s city council approved groundbreaking legislation that will prevent police officers from pulling over motorists for low-level offenses like broken taillights and improperly placed registration stickers. The city’s police department, like many others across America, had come under fire for targeting Black motorists.

The Driving Equality Law, approved 14–2, was the first of its kind in a major American city and expected to reduce the number of traffic stops by about 300,000 per year. Pretextual stops, when an officer pulls a driver over for a mundane reason in order to investigate a more serious crime, check for warrants, or conduct a search with no previous probable cause, are at the core of the driving-while-Black experience.

In the high-profile cases of motorists Sandra Bland in Texas, Walter Scott in South Carolina, and Philando Castile and Daunte Wright in Minnesota, all died after pretextual stops. Wright was pulled over for an expired registration sticker and an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror.

In 2019, in Phoenix, Arizona, a La Paz County sheriff pulled over twenty-two-year-old Black man Phillip Colbert, again for an air freshener. The officer asked Colbert if he had any cocaine or heroin and tried to get consent to search his car. He asked Colbert eight times if smokes marijuana.

(With the Driving Equality Law, Will and Carlton would have been spared a great deal of grief and headache, as their traffic stop would have been illegal.)

According to the Defender Association of Philadelphia, which represents 70 percent of those arrested in Philly for free, 97 percent of police vehicle stops are for low-level violations. Black drivers make up 72 percent of the stops while representing just 43 percent of the city’s population.

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