Daily Kos readers who haven’t done so already should take a trip on over to NPR’s website. They've put together a timeline of the traffic stops of 32-year-old Philando Castile, the St. Paul, Minnesota cafeteria supervisor shot to death by a Falcon Heights police officer on July 6. Gainfully employed by a Montessori school for almost 20 years and a member of the Teamsters Local 320, Castile was stopped 46 times between 2002 and the day he died. NPR’s analysis asks the question of whether Castile was targeted or not:
Of all of the stops, only six of them were things a police officer would notice from outside a car — things like speeding or having a broken muffler.
The records show that Castile spent most of his driving life fighting tickets.
…
"What Mr. Castile symbolizes for a lot of us working in public defense is that driving offenses are typically just crimes of poverty," says Erik Sandvick, a public defender in Ramsey County, which includes St. Paul and its suburbs.
When he heard about Castile in the news, his name sounded so familiar that Sandvick looked up the records and saw his own name listed as Castile's public defender in a 2006 case. He vaguely remembers Castile, but his story is like that of many other clients he's had. They get tickets they can't pay, and then they are ticketed over and over for driving with a suspended license or not having insurance.
Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, a professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University and the author of Crook County, which documents the problems in the criminal justice system of Chicago, said Castile was the "classic case" of what criminologists have called "net widening," or the move by local authorities to criminalize more and more aspects of regular life.
"It is in particular a way that people of color and the poor are victimized on a daily basis," Gonzalez Van Cleve said.
Many times, both Gonzalez Van Cleve and Sandvick agree, the system leaves citizens with no good choices — having to pick, for instance, whether to pay a fine or pay for car insurance.
On July 6, Castile was shot to death by Falcon Heights police officer Jeronimo Yanez. Castile’s partner Lavish Reynolds livestreamed the aftermath of the shooting on Facebook. Reynolds calmly told her audience that they had allegedly been pulled over for a broken tail light. Within days of Castile’s death, audio from the traffic stop was released, showing Officer Jeronimo Yanez’s real reason for pulling over Castile’s car.
“I’m going to stop a car. I’m going to check IDs. I have reason to pull it over.”
“The two occupants just look like people that were involved in a robbery,” the man in the audio adds. “The driver looks more like one of our suspects, just ‘cause of the wide set nose.”
Before you go there, stop—Philando Castile did not die because of a “wide set nose.” He died because the institution of policing allows an officer to think that’s an acceptable reason to pull someone over.