Phil Colbert was on his way to meet his father for lunch before his shift at a car dealership in Arizona in 2019, when he saw the flashing lights of a sheriff’s patrol car in his mirror. He made sure his hands were on the steering wheel, planted at 10 and 2 as his parents taught him, and asked why he was stopped.
“You can not hang anything on your rearview mirror,” the La Paz County deputy said with a Blue Lives Matter wristband.
The officer referred to the tree-shaped air freshener hanging near the windshield, but quickly moved on to other questions: do you have marijuana? Do you smoke marijuana? When was the last time you smoked marijuana? Do you have any cocaine? To Mr. Colbert, who is black, the air freshener seemed nothing more than a pretext for the driving equivalent of a stop-and-fresh.
“At that point, I was like, ‘This guy’s thinking of anything. “He just came up with something to talk to me or to mess with me,” he said. Colbert (23) said. He recorded the traffic stop on his cell phone and finally left with a warning.
The air fresheners that hang from rear-view mirrors have been an overall accessory in cars for decades. But it can be treated as illegal in a majority of countries, which have laws banning objects near the windshield that could obstruct the opinions of motorists. It is part of a series of low-level offenses, such as tinted windows or broken taillights, about which proponents of civil rights complain, have become commonplace for traffic jams that regularly pick colored people.
The meeting this week in Minnesota that led to a police officer fatally shooting Daunte Wright, a 20-year-old black man, began when officers started a traffic stop and raised the issue of a hanging air freshener, according to Mr. Wright’s mother. who spoke to her son telephonically moments before he was shot.
Washington County Attorney Pete Orput said officers had a forged registration tab on Mr. Wright’s license plate noticed and decided to pull over his car. One of the officers later noticed that the air freshener was hanging from the mirror, which is a violation of the law, Mr. Orput said.
Racial prejudice in traffic jams has been a focus of civil rights researchers and advocates for many years. At Stanford University’s public policing project, researchers analyzing more than 100 million traffic jams across the country have found persistent racial differences, with a greater chance of black and Spanish drivers being stopped and more searched. Collectively, officers found a lower rate among the searches than in searches for white drivers.
Traffic jams can also increase, as in the case of Mr. Wright, who was shot by a police officer after getting back into his car when police tried to arrest him for an unrelated warrant. The officer, Kimberly A. Potter, who shouted that she was preparing to use her Taser, resigned and was charged with second-degree manslaughter.
Paige Fernandez, an advocate for police policy at the American Civil Liberties Union, said low-level offenses such as expired registrations and air fresheners on mirrors should not be handled by armed police officers.
“The danger of police traffic coming to a standstill outweighs the benefit of their participation,” she said. Fernandez said.
Mayor Mike Elliott of Brooklyn Center, Minn., Where Mr. Wright was killed, said police officers should not detain people as a result of a registration that expired during the coronavirus pandemic.
The ban on objects hanging from rear-view mirrors can extend to obscure dice, graduation ceremonies and rosaries. Last year, in the midst of the pandemic, authorities in Maine warned against hanging masks.
A woman who answered the phone for the manufacturer of one of the most common hang-up refreshers, Little Trees, said the company would have no comment on the legal debate. The company’s website shows the scented paper trees hanging from a rearview mirror.
States have long struggled over how to best deal with the obstruction problem. After court data showed more than 1,400 citations in one year for people driving on Maryland highways with windshields obstructed by objects or materials, the state changed its law in 2017. The offense is no longer a primary offense, which would justify a traffic stop, but a secondary offense, which can only be cited after a motorist has been pulled over for something serious, such as speeding.
Virginia has followed suit as part of a broader package of reforms that are limited when police can stop traffic jams.
Dana Schrad, executive director of the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police, said the group supports some of the changes, including a ban on stopping people from recently expiring registrations. When lawmakers changed the law to require a driver’s view to be “substantially” obstructed by objects to be considered an offense, police agencies did not object.
By making windshield barriers a secondary offense, some motorists may be able to keep driving, even with substantial barriers that restrict their vision. Ms Schrad said there were concerns that roads could become less safe.
Me. Schrad said that when officers stop people for minor offenses, they may also discover other issues, including outstanding crimes, or evidence of other crimes. “The more you limit the ability of a law enforcement officer to intervene in something that violates the law, the more you limit the ability to detect other criminal activities,” she said.
In places where air fresheners are considered a primary offense, traffic jams have faced legal challenges with different outcomes.
On an April evening in 2008, Benjamin Garcia-Garcia was driving a minibus along Interstate 55 near Springfield, Illinois, when a state troop parked in the median moved on the freeway and pulled him over. According to court reports, the troop claimed to have given the pink air freshener to Mr. Garcia-Garcia’s mirror has been seen hanging, believing it violates state laws that prohibit objects that could obstruct the driver’s vision.
The soldier later admitted that he did not stop every car with an air freshener and did not detect any other traffic violations. The soldier gave a written warning, but in the process he also learned that Mr. Garcia-Garcia and his passengers were in the country illegally. This provoked a reaction from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that led to Mr. Garcia-Garcia faces a federal charge of illegal crossing the border. He was captured and deported.
Mr. Garcia-Garcia disputes the justification for the stop as part of his criminal case, arguing that the troop could not see the air freshener on a vehicle at highway speeds and that he could not conclude that it was a material obstruction. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit dismissed the argument.
“The object the troop noticed was small, but given the size and position of the driver, a reasonable officer could conclude that it violated Illinois law prohibiting material obstruction,” the judges wrote.
In a more recent case, on the South Side of Chicago, a police officer reported that he saw an air freshener in a vehicle and began following the car. During the traffic stop, officers found guns in the vehicle and arrested the two men who were black. The men disputed the legality of the stop, but the same appellate court ruled once again that the stop was constitutional.
But in Connecticut in 2010, after a traffic jam in which a driver hung a chain and cross from his rearview mirror, the Supreme Court found him on the driver’s side and determined that the object was relatively small and that the soldier carrying the stop started do not express any concern that the object is blocking the driver’s view.
The case of mr. Colbert, the motorist who stopped in Arizona in an uninformed area between Parker and Lake Havasu, became public after posting a video of the traffic stop online. He later got a lawyer, Benjamin Taylor, who said he believed the deputy was engaged in racial profiling.
“Even if you are polite, calm, even at university, the end result is that you are still black at the end of the day,” he said. Taylor said. “That’s all the police see and stereotypes.”
The sheriff’s department later ruled that the deputy had no legal basis for his repeated interrogation of Mr. Colbert does not. The deputy, Eli Max, was fired in part for handling the stop. Mr. Colbert took steps to file a lawsuit, but settled with the county before it got this far, Mr. Taylor said.
Even for those who are eventually abandoned with a warning, transgression for a rear-view mirror breach can have a lasting effect. In Galesburg, Illinois, Brittany Mixon was a senior in high school when she was pulled over by a police officer in 2003, apparently due to the air freshener hanging from her mirror. But when the officer approached the car, she said, his first question was whether the Toyota Corolla she was driving was hers.
“He kept asking me questions, like he wanted me to come up,” she said. Mixon, who is black, said.
Even now, at 35, she makes sure nothing is hanging on her mirror – or on the mirror of a car she’s driving – because she does not want to take the risk of being pulled over.
“When I get in a car with someone and something hangs on their mirror, I’m like, ‘Can you take it off?’ ‘, It’s me. Mixon said. “Being a black passenger can cause something in a racist agent, so let’s remove it completely from the situation.”