By Adam Pagnucco.
Council Members Will Jawando and Kristin Mink, who have long been concerned about police traffic stops, are introducing a bill to limit them on Tuesday. At this writing, there are no other co-sponsors.
The bill is a response to a report by the council’s Office of Legislative Oversight finding “wide disparities in police interactions by race and ethnicity.” Among other things, the bill states that a police officer “must not conduct a stop or detain a person operating a motor vehicle, solely for a suspected violation of the following provisions of the Maryland Vehicle Law.” Those provisions relate to:
Certificates of title, vehicle licensing, registration, or insurance
Driving with improper equipment
Lighted lamps required
Use of headlights while windshield wipers are operated under certain weather conditions
Headlights
Illumination of rear license plate
Stop lamps and turn signals
Color of lamps and lighting equipment
Rear red-light reflectors
Stoplights
Glare or dazzling lamp lights
Use of multi-beam road lighting
Number of driving lights required
Signs, posters, and other nontransparent materials on windshields
Window Tinting
Police officers are prohibited from stopping people who cross against a walk signal or cross streets without crosswalks. This would effectively legalize jaywalking.
Traffic stop searches would also be limited. The bill’s introduction memo states:
Further, the Bill limits a police officer’s authority to request permission to conduct a search of a person or vehicle during a traffic stop, regardless of whether the person consents to the search. Consent would not be permissible; instead, the officer must have reasonable suspicion or probable cause to believe that a criminal offense arose during the stop to conduct a search. An officer who violates a provision under this Article would be subject to disciplinary action in accordance with the State-Approved Uniform Disciplinary Matrix.
There are other provisions related to reporting and requirements for issuing warnings.
We will have more to come on the policy implications of this bill. Long before the introduction of this bill, I started crunching data on crime reported in vehicles and – spoiler alert! – there is a lot of it. I will make sure to release it as discussions around this bill get rolling.
In the meantime, here is a tidbit: multiple sources report that Jawando (who is the author) gave other council members a chance to co-sponsor the bill and only Mink signed on. That’s a shift from a couple years ago, when policing legislation regularly attracted a council majority as co-sponsors. (For example, the 2020 use of force bill had 8 sponsors and the 2019 community policing bill had 9. Jawando’s very first bill on independent investigations of police also had 9.) That doesn’t mean that the bill won’t pass.
It will be interesting to see how the executive branch, which has been increasingly concerned about crime, will respond.