- We're now joined by Yannick Wood, director of Criminal Justice Reform at New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.

Their website will be up.

Yannick, great to have you with us.

- Yeah.

Thanks for having me, Steve.

- Let's jump right into this.

So, racial disparities on our road.

The Attorney General Matt Platkin announced a new pilot program that has to do with New Jersey State Police under his purview and the stops going on on our roads.

A couple of numbers, if I can put them out there and you can respond.

People can decide whether this is, quote, racial profiling or not.

Black motorists are 89.8% and Hispanic motorists are 46.4% more likely to be searched once stopped than white motorists.

Black motorists are 88% and Hispanic motorists 57% more likely to be arrested once stopped by New Jersey State Police than white motorists.

Finally, Black motorists are 130%, Hispanic motorists 28% more likely to experience force once stopped by the state police.

Yannick, please talk about where we are and how bad this is.

- Yeah, well, first of all, I just wanna give Attorney General Platkin credit for acknowledging something that motorists of color have known to be true for a long time, and that's that there's racial bias in traffic stops.

But I think the most important thing is what is the attorney general going to do about it?

And we'll see what happens at the end of this pilot program.

- What's the pilot program supposed to do?

- Well, you know, I'm still learning what's gonna actually happen in the pilot program along with the public, but it seems like they're going to try to come up with a system where state troopers could advance traffic safety without perpetuating racial bias.

- Okay, so let's talk about this.

And you have the "New Yorker" cover over your left shoulder with George Floyd.

Let's talk about this.

Let's not talk about particulars of policy, let's just talk about real-life experiences.

To what degree have you experienced, quote, unquote, driving while Black?

- Well, I actually have a very interesting background, 'cause I used to be a part of law enforcement.

I used to be a prosecutor in Queens in New York City.

So, you know, I had that perspective.

I'm also a Black man, the most targeted group as it were, with respect to, you know, these traffic stops.

And I personally have not been pulled over as a result of, you know, racial bias, but, you know, as a prosecutor, you know, I could just think back to, you know, a particular case of mine where, you know, I had an officer make a comment, saying that, "Oh, this person didn't look like they belonged in this neighborhood."

So those are the types of things, you know, that I observed.

Aside from the motor context, you know, I've been racially profiled in convenience stores, and just walking down the street I've been racially profiled.

And that's the reason why I began this segment, by talking about that this is something that people of color, people in New Jersey know to be true.

And so this report is just confirming something.

It's not new.

This type of profiling has existed for a long time.

What I thought was very interesting in some of the statistics that the attorney general put out there is, that even though they're more likely to search Black motorists and Hispanic motorists, Black and Hispanic motorists are less likely to have evidence of whatever they're trying to find through these searches.

So it shows you that the racial bias is not even furthering public safety, it's not even furthering traffic safety.

So I think that it needs to be a hard look at the reason for why we do these traffic stops and to come up with recommendations for how we could further traffic safety and not just be reduced to these racial biases that we've seen for generations.

- By the way, in the 1990s, the racial profiling issue exploded in the state of New Jersey under the Christie Whitman administration, Governor Whitman.

You can go back and read about how bad things were.

And to be so far along, 30 years after that time when things were pretty bad, we're still talking about this.

Let me stay on this, if I could Yannick.

George Floyd, I mentioned the "New Yorker" cover behind you.

From your perspective, what does George Floyd, what does the George Floyd case represent to you, not just professionally, but personally?

- Well, I think George Floyd's murder was a disruption of the status quo of how law enforcement unnecessarily just preys upon people of color, particularly Black men.

It was a disruption of that status quo and it was a racial reckoning where we could see all sorts of systems of racial oppression in all these other types of government institutions and in industry.

And it was a moment where we were all jolted to action to see how we could disrupt these things.

I think when it comes to traffic stops, there needs to be a new philosophical approach to how officers do these traffic stops.

- What do you mean?

- And what I mean by that is, you know, when I went to law school and when I was, you know, in the prosecutor's school, you know, when we were doing the initial training, they spoke about pretextual stops.

That was a term, a legal term that they used, where it was allowed for an officer to pull somebody over for, you know, a code violation or something like that, some moving violation, and then to use that as the opportunity to launch an ad hoc investigation, to escalate the case into something else.

- So it's a pretext.

- As a pretext, exactly, right?

- What's wrong with that approach?

What's wrong with that approach?

- Well, you know, that unnecessarily escalates benign traffic stops into something that shouldn't have to be escalated.

You know, the statistic I mentioned before is that Black and Hispanic motorists in New Jersey who are stopped by state police, more likely to be stopped than white motorists, are less likely to have evidence of crimes.

So it seems like this escalation of trying to search vehicles, trying to ask people, "Hey, you don't have anything that you're supposed to have, or that you're not supposed to have?"

or, "You don't mind if I search your vehicle?"

it seems like that type of conduct is leading not to public safety, but leading to harassment of people of color in New Jersey.

I think the new philosophical approach needs to be that officers should issue more warnings.

If it's truly about traffic safety, then they should use this as a teachable moment, to say, "Oh, you know what?

Your taillight is out."

And I'll do you one better, other states, I know in Long Island they've been doing this, in California and other states around the country, they've been allowing officers to hand out vouchers so that way people can get their taillights fixed, their brake light fixed, or their headlights fixed, because nobody wants to be driving with a broken taillight.

But that's not something- - But we don't do that in New Jersey, we don't do that in New Jersey?

- As far as I know, we're not doing that.

- We're not.

- But I think that that could be part of this pilot program.

I mean, we're coming up with ideas right now for how we could solve the issue, that's one way of solving the issue.

- Complex stuff, to simply call it racial profiling, saying we have to fix the problem of racial profiling, we have to understand it and we have to acknowledge it and we have to break it down and be committed to dealing with it.

And those of us who say, "Hey, it's not a big deal," it's usually because it's not happening to us.

That being said, Yannick Wood, Director of Criminal Justice Reform at New Jersey Institute of Social Justice, I wanna thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you so much.

- I'm Steve Adubato, thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time.

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