MIAMI — Black drivers in Florida were stopped and given tickets for not wearing seat belts nearly twice as often as white motorists who drove on the state’s roads in 2014, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union released Wednesday.
Florida has long grappled with accusations of racial profiling by police, and the ACLU’s report is likely to raise new questions about police procedure and training regarding traffic violations.
“The overticketing of any community in ways that aren’t justified by regular police behavior raises red flags and can cause serious harms,’’ said Nusrat Choudhury, a lawyer with the ACLU’s racial justice program and an author of the report. “Communities feel stigmatized not because of what they have done but who they are. And it burdens people with fines that can be hard to pay.’’
Choudhury said excessive traffic stops for a particular ethnic or racial group could also fuel animosity toward police and could sometimes go awry.
“Even routine traffic stops can tragically escalate,’’ Choudhury said. “Communities that are disproportionately targeted face a greater risk of escalation and harm simply because they are stopped more often.’’
The ACLU is calling on the civil rights division of the Florida attorney general’s office to investigate the lopsided number of citations, and says that police departments should review their training and policies on traffic stops.
Concerns about racial profiling prompted a 2005 change in Florida’s seat belt law that required law enforcement agencies to report on the race and ethnicity of those stopped and given tickets for not wearing seat belts. The agencies are required to send data to the state Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.
Using those numbers and census figures, the ACLU concluded that on average, black drivers were given 22 percent of the tickets issued in 2014 across the state, but that they made up 13.5 percent of the statewide driving-age population with access to a car. The report concluded that blacks were issued tickets at about double the rate of whites.
The report noted that while studies have found that seat belt usage is slightly lower among blacks than whites, the difference does not explain the much larger gap in the number of tickets issued.
New York Times
