Making our roads and communities safer is one of the fundamental goals that almost everyone can agree upon. Now, we have an opportunity to make that happen in Connecticut.
The Connecticut House Bill 5324, an Act Establishing Secondary Traffic Violations, is coming up for a vote. The primary goal of traffic enforcement needs to be roadway safety. This bill would designate a small number of administrative and equipment violations, such as a single busted headlight or a small license plate obstruction, as secondary traffic violations. Police would be prohibited from stopping drivers for these violations unless they also identify a more serious safety violation.
This legislation was originally developed by Connecticut’s Police Transparency and Accountability Task Force, which I served on with other members of law enforcement and communities. The goal was to reform some of our traffic laws to increase equity and public safety. It is a thoughtfully designed bill that would benefit all concerned, from police officers to drivers to communities as a whole.
Passing Bill 5324 would honor and strengthen the goals of Connecticut’s existing anti-racial profiling law, the Alvin W. Penn Racial Profiling Prohibition Act. It would make the roads safer for all drivers, but especially for Black and Latinx residents who have historically been disproportionately subjected to low-level equipment or administrative traffic stops in our state.
According to a report by the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project Advisory Board, police are almost twice as likely to stop Black drivers and 1.5 times more likely to stop Latinx drivers for an equipment-related reason compared to white drivers. Law enforcement is also more likely to stop Black and Latinx drivers than whites for administrative reasons. Traffic stops also result in more searches of Black and Latinx drivers relative to whites, although searches of drivers of color are much less likely to find criminal activity or contraband.
The research has also demonstrated that stops for minor equipment and administrative offenses rarely improve roadway safety and take police away from focusing on more hazardous driving behavior. Researchers noted that between 2019 and 2021, police in Connecticut spent the same amount of time enforcing violations for low-level equipment and administrative offenses as they did for traffic light, stop sign, and cell phone violations combined.
In 2023, Connecticut saw more than 320 roadway fatalities, and 2024 appears to be on pace to be even worse. According to Connecticut’s crash data, excessive speeding contributes to the largest share of all traffic crashes. Failure to stay in the proper lane and following too closely are the largest contributing factors to crashes that result in injury.
The most common equipment issues reported that contributed to a motor vehicle crash were related to brakes, steering, power train, or tires. Police rarely, if ever, stop a car for an issue with brakes, steering, power train, or tires. The equipment issues that police do stop a car for typically relate to defective lights, which contribute to less than 0.1% of all crashes.
We must contemplate new ways of defining how police interact with the public with an eye toward equity and public safety. Our core function must remain focused on traffic and personal safety of the communities that we serve. As someone who has spent more than 40 years in law enforcement, both state and local policing, I know that the good men, women, and others serving in this profession strive to enforce the laws to reduce the activity of dangerous driving behaviors. Black, brown, or white, we all agree that impaired and unsafe or erratic driving must be stopped.
Chief John “Jack” Drumm served a career in the Connecticut State Police and has led the Madison Police Department since 2010.