By Dr. Sota Omoigui M.D & Isiuwa Omoigui
The first and most important step in criminal justice reform is to reduce minorities contact with the police, for minor offenses such as traffic tickets. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world because we arrest and handcuff our way for every minor offense. Our incarceration rate is 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States has about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, the United States incarcerates its citizens at a rate 5 to 10 times higher than other industrialized countries; some 2.27 million people were incarcerated in jails and prisons across the country in 2017 — a 500% increase over the last 40 years. Black people and minorities generally are criminalized by a justice system wherein arrest warrants are issued for minor traffic infractions and failure to show up to court. This has led to situations like with Sandra Bland who lost her life because she did not signal to change lanes.
Since the killings of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, and the ongoing shooting and killing of Black people and minorities, there has been an outcry about police brutality and the need to change a pervasive culture that criminalizes minorities with a quick resort to lethal force for the most insignificant of offences.
When you compare how the police react in similar situations with white people, where there is no resort to lethal force, you can come to only one conclusion – that they place no value on the lives of black people.
The police are aided and abetted by a culture of impunity; where their police union contracts prevent the authorities from questioning them for three days after a killing so they can get their story right, where they are given qualified immunity as government employees so they have no civil liability for their conduct, where they have no consequences for the falsified police reports that they turn in on a regular basis, where there are no priorities placed on de-escalation, where their colleagues cover up for them in the Mafia culture of omertà silence, and finally where the legal standards for their use of lethal force are so low that it is almost impossible to convict them in a jury of their peers.
All of that needs to change. The powers of the police unions must be clipped, and the police must be held accountable like every other citizen. The police unions should be restricted to negotiating only wages and nothing more.
As a society, we can do our best to reduce police officers’ implicit bias, but we cannot eradicate it.
Therefore, there is an urgent need for criminal justice reform that starts at the very beginning of our system of mass incarceration.
The first and most important step in criminal justice reform is to reduce minorities contact with the police, for minor offenses such as traffic tickets. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world because we arrest and handcuff our way for every minor offense.
Our incarceration rate is 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States has about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.
According to the Equal Justice Initiative, the United States incarcerates its citizens at a rate 5 to 10 times higher than other industrialized countries; some 2.27 million people were incarcerated in jails and prisons across the country in 2017 — a 500% increase over the last 40 years.
Black people and minorities generally are criminalized by a justice system wherein arrest warrants are issued for minor traffic infractions and failure to show up to court.
This has led to situations like with Sandra Bland who lost her life because she did not signal to change lanes. The police should have had no reason to arrest Sandra Bland or Rayshard Brooks and humiliate both of them with handcuffs.
Neither of them killed or caused injury to anybody and both should have been given a ticket. Rayshard Brooks should have been given a ride home to his house or the hospital.
People are more prone to resist arrest when they are humiliated by putting handcuffs on them, and also fearful that once the handcuffs are on, the police could kill them with a knee to their necks as they did with George Floyd. Furthermore, in their calculus, in resisting arrest is the presence of existing traffic warrants that would send them to jail.
There is absolutely no reason to criminalize traffic offenses especially those that do not result in injury or loss of life as a criminal offense. Even when the defendant does not show up in court, there is no reason to issue a warrant.
Minor traffic offenses should be taken away from the court system and placed under a separate Social Services Agency where they are treated as a civil matter with fines and wage garnishment where necessary.
The practice of impounding vehicles with large daily fines that make it impossible to retrieve such vehicles by the end of one week, has no net benefit to society. It impoverishes minorities and is a push down a slippery slope of losing transportation to work, then losing their jobs, and then their place of living, resulting in homelessness.
We need both criminal justice and police reform, and we need them now
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Dr. Sota Omoigui is an author and physician practicing in Hawthorne, California and Founder of a tech startup, Xchange Mall – Super App (www.xchange.world).
Isiuwa Omoigui is a sophomore at Yale University.
