Auditors found tens of thousands of apparently falsified traffic stop records, many of white drivers. They suspect the officers were trying to appear more productive.

  • teft@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    many of white drivers. They suspect the officers were trying to appear more productive.

    I suspect that the officers are trying to game some sort of racial profiling system so that the systemic racism is slightly less visible.

  • Tug@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My first impression after reading, is that it was indeed to make it look like people of color were being stopped at a proportionate rate.

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      I wonder if that’s how they noticed. “These guys are pulling over the whites, something’s not right here!”

  • athos77@kbin.social
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    many of white drivers. […] the officers were trying to appear more productive.

    And less racist.

    • snooggums@kbin.social
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      While my first thought too, state demographics means the vast majority of random drivers would be white. The fact that they pointed it out leans to trying to appear less racist.

      • Ech@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        While my first thought too, state demographics means the vast majority of random drivers would be white.

        That’s the thing about systemic racism - it’s not random.

  • pikasaurX4@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Obviously this is inappropriate and essentially robbing the tax payers of their money, but I would rather falsified stops than have them pulling over innocent people and issuing tickets to “meet quotas”. This country needs serious police reform one way or another

    • admiralteal@kbin.social
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      There should be no such thing as a routine traffic stop. That kind of adversarial police interaction should NOT be happening to citizens behaving normally. It should be reserved only for people behaving in a truly deviant way, which modest speeding is not. Normalizing this kind of interaction is part of what it means to be in a police state.

      You can automate highway speed enforcement for a lot cheaper than the wage of police officers sitting and waiting at a trap all day, and will catch everyone instead of just a bunch of arbitrarily (or worse) chosen randos from the pack.

      For outside of highways, you can still automate speed enforcement, but you also need to be designing roads that discourage speeding. Current ASHTO/MUDCD rules do the opposite, constantly pushing roads to have higher speeds in pursuit of better letter grades even though this represents a constant one-way ratchetting of road danger.

      The purpose of road rules, including speed limits, needs to be SAFETY, not funding. Pretty much every municipality outside of the US that pursues vision zero programs does so primarily with engineering rather than enforcement, and when enforcement is used, camera-based enforcement is more effective and less likely to murder some random person of color.

      • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        All of that is true, but even with all of of that, any traffic violations would still be a routine traffic stop, because there’s always going to be people driving just a little bit outside the bounds of safety.

        • admiralteal@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          I disagree. Strongly.

          Good road designs self-enforce safety.

          There’s only a short list of things that ROUTINELY get people pulled over.

          Speeding, which is better enforced by cameras than cops. Relying on human enforcement means people pull the lever on the gamble. Automated enforcement means you will get caught, and there’s no better deterrent to crime than that. And road design is STRONGLY correlated with prevailing speed. You can calm a road with better designs – if a road is rife with routine dangerous speeding, most likely it’s the engineer’s fault for putting in a racetrack instead of a street.

          Running red lights. Same as above.

          Vehicles out-of-spec. Expired tags, damaged tail lights, etc… A lot of this stuff should simply not result in a pull-over. Key in the plate then send the person notice and/or a fine in the mail.

          Running stop signs/failing to yield to pedestrians. Not even that routine, but anywhere where this is a routine problem is SURELY an intersection that needs a redesign (e.g., roundabout treatment, traffic calming) to eliminate bad behavior.

          DUI. This is deviant and unacceptable behavior. Cops should be enforcing this and people caught driving intoxicated should see their rights to operate motor vehicles RAPIDLY escaping them.

          Using cell phones. Largely same as above.

          And there’s one other routine traffic stop – the pretextual traffic stop, where the cops are just making the fuck up some bullshit reason to stop you in order to try and get you on some other crime / violate your civil rights.

          There’s a litany of other common and bad driver behaviors that happen routinely. Failure to yield, merging on people, pulling out without looking, et cetera… but most of these do NOT generate traffic stops because no cop sees it happening and even if they do they don’t give a shit.

    • 520@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      This is the thing though, they were pulling over innocent people, specifically those of minority backgrounds. They invented the white ones so as to avoid scrutiny.

  • ryan213@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Pull over! He’s already pulled over. Pull over! He can’t pull over any further!

  • derpo@lemmy.world
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    Honestly, I’m not even that mad. If only nytimes would let me read those specifics

    • Jay@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      On an unseasonably warm morning in February 2017, a 75-year-old white motorist was making his way north on Interstate 95 in Westbrook, Conn., when he was pulled over by a state trooper and charged with a traffic violation.

      That is, at least, according to a traffic stop report filed by the officer. But no ticket appears to have been issued.

      In fact, there may not have been any stop. The driver may not even exist.

      State officials believe that the trooper was among more than 100 Connecticut state police officers who may have filed false reports of traffic stops in recent years, possibly to boost the internal statistics used to measure their performance.

      A recent audit described “a pattern of record manipulation” and said there was a “high likelihood” that at least 25,966 recorded stops between 2014 and 2021 were false and that as many as 58,553 may have been, at minimum, inaccurate.

      “What was the motivation here, really?” asked Ken Barone, a co-author of the audit. Most likely, he said, “the motivation here was to appear productive.”

      The idea that Connecticut’s state police officers may have conducted a yearslong scheme of systematic deceit has shocked the public, embarrassed the state’s law enforcement community and enraged its political leadership at a time of national conversations about police accountability.

      The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating, state officials said. Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, has launched a separate inquiry.

      “The trust and the confidence in Connecticut state police is clearly shaken by this,” said State Representative Steve Stafstrom, a Democrat and the co-chairman of the state legislature’s judiciary committee.

      The ticket reports under scrutiny may have also irrevocably tainted the racial data that the state collects on traffic stops. That is because the motorists who were purportedly stopped were disproportionately white, said Mr. Barone, who is the manager of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project, which seeks to identify and address racial and ethnic disparities in traffic enforcement.

      The auditors compiled their research by comparing two sets of data: court records of real tickets issued to real people and internal data from the state police.

      “Every time Trooper A said they stopped a car and issued a ticket, I should be able to find said ticket in the court system,” Mr. Barone said.

      But the numbers did not add up. Mr. Barone and his team kept finding reported tickets that had no match in the court system — no matter how they tried to account for typos or other mistakes. He said they had used an “extremely conservative” approach.

      “The philosophy that we had was: ‘When in doubt, give them credit,’” he said.

      But Mr. Barone said he saw almost no way that troopers could have made some of the stops they reported.

      In one case, a trooper logged five registration violations over a 30-minute period. Another trooper reported issuing five speeding tickets in 22 minutes. Another reported three speeding tickets in 14 minutes. Still another claimed to have issued three wrong-lane tickets, in a work zone, in nine minutes.

      Mr. Barone said that members of the Connecticut Racial Profiling Prohibition Project were inspired to begin the audit last summer after Hearst Connecticut Media reported that four troopers were found to have falsified records in 2018. They strongly suspected a much broader pattern, he said.

      Now the auditors, who included researchers from the University of Connecticut and Northeastern University, say they believe the problem is widespread.

      Their report, released earlier this summer, found 130 former and current officers who had filed suspicious reports. James C. Rovella, the head of the state’s Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, told lawmakers in July that 68 of those officers were still active. He did not respond to a request for comment.

      Some troopers have been cleared of wrongdoing in the weeks since the audit was released.

      Andrew Matthews, the general counsel and executive director of the state police union, put that number at 27; Mr. Barone said the auditors had cleared only 20, because of duplicate badge numbers. The state police declined to comment, citing an ongoing investigation.

      Experts in criminal justice say the ticket scandal has revealed a lack of accountability within the state police.

      “If we can’t trust them for traffic tickets, how are we going to trust them for cases like sexual assault, or murder?” said Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, a sociologist at Brown University who studies policing and prosecutors.

      “The state troopers sort of view themselves as better than local police officers,” said Mike Lawlor, a criminal justice professor at the University of New Haven, who is also a member of the state’s Police Officer Standards and Training Council, which certifies officers. “But also, over time, they’ve had a culture where there was essentially no real oversight of them.”

      The state police union has sued to block the release of the names of the troopers under suspicion until the investigations conclude. Mr. Matthews said they are entitled to due process — and that revealing their identities could put them in danger.

      He also cast doubt on the audit’s methodology: He said auditors had not done enough research to understand how the ticket reporting system works.

      Although some state troopers had cruisers equipped with electronic ticket recording systems during the period of the audit, others had to write out tickets by hand. Mr. Matthews said that auditors had not appropriately checked electronic court records against the carbon copies of handwritten tickets on file with the state police.

      “Why is everyone in such a rush to tarnish the good names of people that did nothing wrong?” he asked.

      Mr. Matthews, a former state trooper, was among those whose reports were flagged. He denied any wrongdoing and said one of his cruisers did not have an electronic recording system.

      “I did my job with the utmost integrity,” he said.

      Instead of widespread dishonesty, Mr. Matthews suggested that there could have been data entry issues.

      Maybe, he said, some of the stops resulted in infractions more serious than a ticket, and an officer misreported them as tickets. Perhaps a trooper issued a warning, instead of a ticket, but a dispatcher entered it incorrectly.

      Advocates and lawyers said that they need accurate traffic stop data in part to assess whether officers are unfairly targeting Black and Hispanic drivers.

      Connecticut outlawed racial profiling of drivers in 1999. The Racial Profiling Prohibition Project has been collecting and analyzing statewide data since 2013.

      But the state troopers’ data is now “obsolete,” said Claudine Constant, the public policy and advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut.

      In fact, the audit found that the reports under suspicion were almost 10 percentage points more likely than verified reports to involve white drivers, and about 4.5 percentage points less likely to involve Black or Hispanic drivers.

      “This audit reveals a pretty breathtaking disrespect for the states’ racial prohibition law,” Ms. Constant said. “And even worse, the goal of attempting to reduce traffic stops that might be grounded in racism.”

      Now, officials are trying to determine whether there was systematic fraud — and, if so, how high up it went.

      “If they misused the system intentionally, the question that stems from that is: ‘Why was nobody arrested?’” said State Representative Craig Fishbein, a Republican who is the ranking House member of the legislature’s judiciary committee.

      The scandal may also have repercussions across the justice system.

      Already, the lawyer for a man accused of murder is arguing that he should be told whether the state police officers involved in the case were flagged in the audit — which would undermine their credibility. Mr. Lawlor, the criminal justice professor, said he expected other defense attorneys across the state to make similar arguments — until the names of troopers under investigation are released.