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Do We Still Need Traffic Stops?
It’s 2022: Traffic cams work and police departments are understaffed.
Criminal justice reform, all the rage in 2020, seems to have fallen deeply out of fashion in 2022.
As a wave of high-profile property crimes and a rising tide of homicide gripped major cities in the wake of COVID19, the fledging inclination to take a critical look at policing in America crashed back to earth.
One movement in particular caught on after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020: Defund the Police.
For months, activists chanted it in the streets. During the height of the pandemic, with the full-throated blessing of the American medical community including the CDC no less, thousands upon thousands of people carried it on banners and signs, staged marches and sit-ins and protests.
#DefundthePolice took over Twitter and other social media sites. For a time, you couldn’t open a newspaper or turn on the television without hearing some reference to the oddly-specific clamor to reform policing.
After all, there were- at that time- a number of important deliverables criminal justice reform advocates were already working on. Moving directly to the most extreme position; advocating for a police-free society seemed a bit of an untenable stretch.