As reported today by the Daily Beast, Minnesota’s Ramsey County Attorney (equivalent to a district attorney) John Choi has announced that he’s no longer going to support fishing-expedition traffic stops by the police in his county. (Note: The Minnesota State Capital, St. Paul, lies in Ramsey County, so this is not just some Podunk county.) John Choi prosecuted Philando Castile’s killer in 2016. The officer was acquitted.
In honor of Castile, Choi announced Wednesday his office will no longer prosecute felony cases resulting from minor traffic stops for violations like an expired registration, overly tinted windows or broken lights. The change, Choi said, is a deliberate attempt to cut down on what he said are unnecessary stops by police of people of color that too often spiral into fatal incidents.
This is not Choi’s first effort to reign in such stops, which too often escalate to violence.
Despite the praise from some corners, Choi told The Daily Beast he’s been working behind the scenes to get police departments in his county onboard with the change. The hope, he said, is that his new strategy isn’t just a top-down decision, but one that would also inspire departments to amend their own internal policies and practices—which experts said often train police to stop drivers of color and those in high crime areas with low-level traffic stops in the hopes of finding drugs or guns.
Choi’s announcement, of course, has not been met with universal approval, especially from law enforcement:
But Allison Schaber, the president of a union representing Ramsey County Sheriff Office deputies [[Note: Philando Castile was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, an officer with the St. Anthony Police Department, not a member of the Sheriff’s Office]], told The Daily Beast that Choi’s new policy, “is another example of the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office circumventing the legislative process to satisfy his own political ambitions.” Schaber said Choi furthers the “misnomer” that valid traffic stops for small violations “are anything less than legal stops that target activity already deemed illegal.”
I wonder how much control Choi really has over this, though. Can he be over-ridden or even fired by Ramsey County administration for not enforcing the law? On the other hand, I do remember that back in the late 60s or early 70s, the NYPD Police Commissioner said the Department was going to stop enforcing Sunday Blue Laws as they were a needless drain on the Department’s resources. He seems to have gotten away with it.