Distracted partners: Why police traffic enforcement is inefficient

Abstract As communities throughout the country adopt policies designed to reduce traffic fatalities to their lowest possible numbers, they rely heavily on police for traffic enforcement. Within policing communities, however, traffic stops are seen not only as a means to encourage better driving, but also as an important tool for drug interdiction and crime control. This renders the police “distracted partners” in the fight against dangerous driving. We analyze 246,003 stops conducted by the San Diego Police Department using geolocated traffic‐stop data. We compare a model of traffic stops driven by injury‐causing collisions to models where the stops are associated with crime and minority population. We find that the police are attentive to collisions but driven more by crime and minority population levels. We conclude that traffic safety efforts could more effectively be enhanced by a non‐police agency devoted solely to reducing serious collisions, fatalities, and the public health threats from cars, with the police focused on crime control. The combined mission for the police of doing traffic safety and crime control results in suboptimal outcomes with regard to crash and injury prevention.