I completely agree with you, but I don't think this will happen until we end the war on drugs and civil asset forfeiture. If traffic stops were really just about public safety then you wouldn't need armed officers to execute them.
Creating a class of disarmed traffic officers could be a great way to help restore the concept of privacy - make them powerless to enforce or provide testimony on anything besides traffic laws. This would have similar effects to deillegalizing personal possession of substances, including the non-politically-favored ones.
Then, prevent the armed group from doing any traffic enforcement - they're solely reserved for already-escalated situations. Furthermore, this could reduce the perverse incentive of a highly paid position doing overtime traffic duty.
(And furthermore while we're exploring this fantasy of defascizing automobile transport, let's change license plates to e-ink with a privacy-preserving blinded number that changes every hour)
[0] By mandating that the person stop, open their window, etc, with any non-compliance escalating to legal probable cause.
If I were to communicate with an officer by written messages shown through the glass (to avoid a search of my cabin air), do you think it would go well?
What you're probably trying to say is that arrest generates cause for search, under the rules for "search incident to arrest".
But arrest is a big deal, far bigger than traffic stop or even roadside detention.
As for trying to communicate with officers through glass: I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish, but there are tens of videos of people rolling their windows down minimally to respond to traffic stops, so that police can't put their heads in the car. ACLU even publishes one of them.
Do you dispute that it's a common occurrence for people to be pulled over for a civil traffic violation yet to end up arrested for possession of something? This phenomenon flies in the face of the fourth amendment, the courts' function of finding logical justifications for the status quo notwithstanding.
People are routinely searched at traffic stops because they aren't taught their rights properly, and comments that say traffic stops provide "de facto" probable cause for searches don't help (the harm is obviously marginal, but still.)
I certainly support people who go through the effort of asserting their rights (and do some of this myself, but I also realize that game is more than just a legal one). If I were into divisive identity politics, I would say that perhaps the various legal chess moves just work most of the time for privileged people (the videos you referenced etc). But alas that's a losing race-to-the-bottom framework, and we're better off talking about rights.
I like your original post. I'm expanding on it and pointing out how we could completely avoid all of these issues with separate roles - I don't think that parking critters are particularly concerned with searching one's possessions either. Can we agree that it would be better if maintaining one's own rights did not require a law degree and constant vigilance?
If you ask a lawyer about receiving compensation for eg false arrest/imprisonment/tangible damage, they'll just chuckle. So these videos are more practical advice for people engaged in actual lawbreaking [0], rather than an avenue of justice or reforming the police from their unaccountable thuggery.
I mean, taking a step back from immediate practical advice - it's patently ridiculous that a public servant purporting to uphold the law is expected to lie and trick you about that law. What then exactly are they upholding?
[0] which admittedly is all of us in some manner, and go grey market entrepreneurs!
The problem is, what is you're definition of often? And how effective is a (likely holstered handgun) in these situations?
Is an armed officer more or less likely to be shot at? Does the presence of an armed officer in all routine traffic stop increase safety overall (not just for the officer, but for non-violent civilians as well).
If you look at it from a cost benefit analysis, giving all traffic cops firearms may result in a small decrease in total deaths of officers during traffic stops [1], but a small increase in the total number of deaths of civilians (both innocent bystanders, and belligerent civilians who had no intention to seriously harm anyone).
That's probably not enough to justify arming all traffic cops. However if you add in the benefit of a firearm as a tool of compliance to aid in traffic cop's abilities to confiscate drugs and cash, you tip the balance towards arming them.
1. Even this is a big assumption, because we don't know if criminals are more or less likely to fire at armed vs. unarmed traffic cops.
46.3% of federal prisoners (nearly 85,000) are imprisoned for drug offenses -- not quite an absolute majority, but nearly triple the next highest category (Weapons, Explosives, and Arson.) [0]
Fairly recently, it was only 17% for state prisons [1], which is still quite significant -- about 1 in 6.
But both of those understate the degree to which the drug war drives imprisonment, because drug crimes (which tend to have a shorter sentence than violent crimes) account for nearly 1/3 of prison admissions, despite accounting for a lower share of total prison population. [1]
[0] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
[1] http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2...
The contention upthread was that "Contrary to popular perception, the drug war is not a major factor in incarceration in the US."
Drug offenses alone (and the drug war produces, and includes imprisonment for, other, non-drug offenses) account for about 1/6 of the total prison population and 1/3 of total prison admissions (sources addressed in my previous post in this subthread.) Ending the drug war -- even if you consider only drug offenses, would eliminate a significant share of the total prison population, and a much larger share of total prison admissions.
The facts clearly show that, while drug offenses alone are not the majority of incarceration in the US (either by population or admissions), the Drug War is a very significant contributor to incarceration in the US.
Which is an interesting factoid, but irrelevant to the issue of whether or not the drug war is a significant factor in incarceration. That 70% of the increase from 1995 to 2013 is from that source (which, while it isn't specific to drug offenses, overlaps, rather than being disjoint from, the drug war) is almost entirely irrelevant to the issue of whether the drug war is a significant in the overall level (whether stock or flow) of incarceration, which it is and remains. (Basically, the main change is longer sentencing, which means simply increases the "stock" contribution of violent/property crimes to incarceration, without doing much to the "flow".)
> but we should not delude ourselves that the solution for police violence or violent crime will come from changing the rules about drugs.
Since no one has suggested that the solution to either of those would come from that source alone, that -- while true -- would seem to be a complete strawman.