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Male Speaker 1: If ever there was a time in America when the police should be on their greatest behavior, their best behavior, it should be now.

Tanzina Vega: Another traffic stop. Another Black American dead. This time, the victim was 20-year-old Daunte Wright who was shot and killed by a veteran officer on the Brooklyn Center Police Force in Minnesota on Sunday. Wright is just the latest example of a Black driver who didn't make it out alive after being pulled over for what was supposed to be a routine traffic stop.

Philando Castile and Terence Crutcher are two other high-profile cases of Black people who've been killed in police traffic stops over the past few years. Racial profiling is a big reason for many of these stops. Today Black drivers are 20% more likely to be pulled over than white drivers and Black drivers are also more likely to be ticketed than white drivers.

Wealth isn't a deterrent for these stops either. In 2016, after the killing of Philando Castile, South Carolina, Senator Tim Scott revealed that he had been pulled over seven times in the course of one year. Even when these incidents don't end in death, they can still be moments of extreme trauma and stress.

Police Officer 1: Work with us when we talk to you. Get out of the car.

Police Officer 2: You receive their order, obey it.

Male Speaker 2: I'm honestly afraid to get out.

Police Officer 2: Then you should be, get out, get out.

Tanzina Vega: Consider army 2nd Lieutenant Caron Nazario a Black Latino man in uniform, who in December was pulled over by police with their guns drawn and pepper-sprayed. I'm Tanzina Vega and examining why driving while Black is so dangerous in this country is where we begin today on The Takeaway. Rashad Robinson is president of Color Of Change, and he joins me now Rashad, welcome back to the show.

Rashad Robinson: Thanks for having me, great to be with you.

Tanzina Vega: Rashad, what do we know about the traffic stop that Daunte Wright experienced before he was killed?

Rashad Robinson: What we know is that it's typical. It's par for the course of what we see time and time again. Someone being pulled over in a way that's deeply profiled, a Black person being pulled over in a way that's deeply profiled that the police move in on a Black suspect in a way that they would never move in on a white suspect. Then what doesn't always happen but what happens far too often is that we now end up with someone that has been hurt, harmed, or killed and in this case killed.

Then we end up with police department trying to figure out a story and closing ranks to protect themselves. Time and time again, when we see these incidents happen we end up with a situation where police refuse to take any accountability for the structural challenges and the structural rules both written and unwritten that actually incentivize the killing of Black people by police in this country and a system that far too often overwhelmingly denied any type of accountability to the families or the community.

Tanzina Vega: You said that this is a structural issue and I want to understand that because part of what we're thinking about in doing this segment is thinking about the incidents that we know of, the Philando Castile killing, the Daunte Wright killing, the Terence Crutcher killing. All of these happened in what we're supposed to be routine traffic stops and I'm wondering what is the calculus that turns a traffic stop into a killing?

Rashad Robinson: Part of the calculus is what we know about police culture. Police culture, which is deeply racist. I know that this may sound maybe hyperbolic to some of your listeners or that I'm just throwing things out there but in 2015, the FBI actually came out with a report talking about the infiltration of white nationalism and the racism inside of policing in this country.

We also deal with the policing culture that actually fails to really ever admit to racial profiling existing. I say this as someone that has sat in meetings during the Obama White House. I remember a meeting back in 2016 with about 30 folks in the room, it was advocates like myself, it was mayors, and other elected officials, and it was those in law enforcement. The head of the fraternal order of police responded to me, in public, in front of President Obama in front of elected officials and police chiefs when I started talking about racial profiling, he interrupted me, this is Joe Pasquale and said, "All of this talk of racial profiling is new to me."

It would be one thing for him to say, I don't agree about your demands, around what to do. I don't think that is happening as much, but he gaslit the very idea that racial profiling exists. What we have on one hand is widespread racial profiling happening. You tick through some of the numbers in the opening, and then you end up with a policing culture that actually fails to admit that it doesn't exist. Then what we get as politicians who say, "Oh, we just need more training." This police officer was one of the leaders of the training and she couldn't even figure out the difference between her taser and her gun. She was one of the trainers.

This is what we end up with is we end up with garbage in and garbage out as it relates to the type of cutting around the edges that end up happening when these incidents happening rather than actually going to the structures. Structurally policing in this country has been, and is about control. When you are focused on control and not focused on safety, you end up killing people for no reason because who was in danger during that traffic stop?

The only person that was in danger was Daunte Wright and Daunte Wright is no longer with us now. The police officer pulled out a gun instead of pulling out a taser and we should make no mistake, tasers are also deeply dangerous. They are not safe devices. Far too often tasers get pulled on Black people and use on Black people as well.

Tanzina Vega: Black drivers are 20% more likely to be stopped by police than white drivers are. We also know that police departments across the country-- this was something almost a decade ago now that was being talked about, if not longer, about how to implement implicit bias training so that these incidences do not happen and yet here we are. Rashad, what do we know about how much of this supposed implicit bias training has been implemented across the country?

Rashad Robinson: There's definitely implicit bias training happening in different places. What we know is that the end of the day, it doesn't actually lead to better outcomes at a macro level. If we don't deal with downsizing policing, if we don't deal with actually putting in accountability structures that really have teeth to them.

Right now, police officers, unlike so many other professions cannot be held civically accountable for what they do on the job. What we end up with is this situation called qualified immunity, where police officers are not held accountable. We watch as police unions have created a whole set of rules and structures, whether it's how they elect prosecutors and put mayors into office over $50 million injected into election since 2012 to leverage their power, to dictate the terms of elections.

Then what we also see when it relates to the way in which policing works is that we send police to do things that they shouldn't be doing. We send police to go deal with someone who's passed a bad check. We send someone with a gun to go deal with someone that's having a mental health episode. Policing has also become this thing that we send in all situations and that also has to stop, but police are not held accountable.

Because we have this structure of lack of accountability, you can't actually train racism away and you can't actually do implicit bias when someone is given a gun and someone has given carte blanche power to be able to do whatever they want to do.

Tanzina Vega: What do drivers, particularly Black drivers need to be aware of when it comes to their rights if they're pulled over by police? Let's tackle that.

Rashad Robinson: This has becomes really hard as we increasingly see these videos where Black people are following the rules, putting their hands on the steering wheel, trying to talk slowly. You have a military man in a uniform who is trying to be in conversation with the police and is still being tased. You have all of these situations happening, but yes, we do have rights, but I think it's important to recognize that there's written rules and there's unwritten rules.

What we tell the young people in our lives is keep your hands on the steering wheel. Don't make any sudden moves. Speak slowly and clearly. Do your best to follow the directions of the officer and try to get out of this situation alive but that is-- Unfortunately, those set of rules can oftentimes be thrown out at any given moment because what we end up with is police officers that are not playing by any set of rules.

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Tanzina Vega: Rashad Robinson is the president of Color Of Change. Rashad. Thanks so much.

Rashad Robinson: Thanks for having me.

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Tanzina Vega: We've been hearing from our listeners on this as well. We asked if you've ever been pulled over by police. What were your feelings about your personal safety?

Rashid: My name is Rashid and I moved to the US when I was 12 years old. It's crazy hearing about all these traffic stops calamities that can come out of it because this wasn't something that I knew was a thing when I moved here. As a black man myself I find that I have to drive super carefully just to avoid traffic stops. I do everything in my power just to maximize my survival.

Ginger Graham: Hi, my name's Ginger Graham, and I'm from Columbia, South Carolina. As a black woman, living in South Carolina, I have learned that it's in my best interest to always keep silent in the event that I have the need to express some grievance or issue whenever I've been pulled over. It's sad that I have to feel this way, especially in 2021, but it's just a fact. However, whenever that court date or that court appearance comes along, it's game on at that point.

Female Speaker: I'm a black woman living in Weymouth, Massachusetts. Weymouth is one of the most racist towns I've ever lived in. I've been here for four years now. I do get pulled over and I am afraid every time I get pulled over. However, I don't subscribe to the notion that I need to beg for my humanity to be recognized or that I need to appear less threatening or my 17-year-old son needs to appear less threatening to appease someone's prejudices, it's scary.

Every time here I get pulled over, but if the officer is nice to us, then we in turn are respectful to them. If they are not respectful to us, we answer in kind. I am afraid, but no, I don't do anything to make myself appear more palatable to someone who has racism at the forefront of their mind.

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