D.C. police starting new unit dedicated to street traffic safety (Washington Post)
Shift into Safe News
The Washington, D.C., police department is dedicating five officers solely to street traffic enforcement, a new initiative responding to record-high fatalities on city streets, officials announced last year.
While small, the new unit marks a change in approach after years of decline in traffic enforcement by officers on patrol. The redeployment will happen “imminently,” a police spokesman said.
“I’m excited,” said Sgt. Terry Thorne, who leads traffic enforcement efforts for the police. He said the citywide team “will save lives.”
Police pulled back considerably from traffic enforcement during the pandemic, both in D.C. and nationally. Meanwhile, deaths soared. While fatalities have since begun to decline in other parts of the country, they are still going up in the District, which has seen 34 deaths this year. Last year marked a 16-year high in deaths, and already this year, more people have died in crashes than in all of 2014, when the city pledged to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024.
City police emphasize that they have been enforcing traffic laws through road checkpoints and federally funded safety initiatives targeting drunken driving, high-speed scooter riding and other dangerous behavior. But on patrol, unless asked to focus on traffic by precinct captains, officers have enforced traffic laws only if they aren’t responding to calls or otherwise occupied.
“To make a traffic stop, an officer must observe the violation and not otherwise be on a call,” a D.C. police spokesperson said earlier this month in response to questions about traffic enforcement.
These officers will instead be focused full-time on catching criminal behavior on the roads.
Checkpoints, a safer but still effective way of enforcing traffic laws, are being held roughly twice a week and have led to roughly 3,000 tickets and 140 arrests. Automated cameras, which the city has deployed in growing numbers across the city, have also been shown to reduce speeding and crashes. But neither addresses other streets where residents routinely complain that they see drivers flouting traffic laws with impunity. And traffic fatalities are heavily concentrated in majority-Black neighborhoods on the east side of the city.
Rick Birt, director of the city’s Highway Safety Office, said that with the right training and policies, “we can do traffic enforcement equitably.” He added that “the vast majority of residents want safe streets. … They want people to be out there changing behavior.”
Police are still limited in how they pursue fleeing vehicles, he noted, which can contribute to violent crashes rather than prevent them.
The new officers will be reassigned from other units, so the change does not require any extra funds. But the department remains understaffed, with about 800 fewer officers than Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has set as her target.
