St. Louis stopped enforcing traffic laws. You’ll never guess what happened next
Conn Carroll
After Michael Brown had been killed in the act of attacking a police officer, but before George Floyd was murdered by law enforcement in Minneapolis in 2020, there was Anthony Lamar Smith. Smith, a convicted drug dealer, was shot dead by St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley after Smith smashed Stockley’s police car and led him on a three-minute police chase.
Stockley was later acquitted of murder, and St. Louis erupted in riots — or, as CNN would call them, “mostly peaceful protests.”
In response to the 2017 Smith riots and the 2020 Floyd riots, St. Louis police began to pull back on traffic enforcement. And as it became clear police would no longer chase offending vehicles, drivers began to flee from law enforcement when signaled instead of pulling over.
The results of the traffic enforcement pullback have been stark. In 2009, St. Louis police made 85,000 traffic stops, issued 35,000 tickets, and made 3,400 traffic arrests. Now those numbers have almost all been cut in half.
In 2021, St. Louis police made just 45,000 traffic stops, issued fewer than 18,000 tickets, and made just 1,300 arrests.
And this would all be fine, except that as traffic stops were cut in half, the number of traffic deaths doubled.
In 2009, there were about 40 traffic deaths compared to 81 in 2021. It turns out that when you stop enforcing traffic laws, people drive more dangerously, and more people die. And that isn’t the only harm.
“As a general rule, the public rightly wants to see laws on the books enforced, because if they’re not enforced, that generates the perception that you can commit crime with impunity,” University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Enforcement has costs. Traffic fines are a pain, and anytime the police interact with someone committing a crime, there is a risk of violence. But the costs of not enforcing the law are very real too. St. Louis is just one city rediscovering this reality.