A favor in the rearview

Photo credit: Associated Press 

By JoAnne Young

I’m thinking a lot this week, as many of us are, about the deaths of unarmed Black men and women, killed by police who are sworn to serve and protect. 

 

The death of one in particular, Daunte Demetrius Wright, the latest to be highly publicized, brings me back 10 years to a forward thinking senator in the Nebraska Legislature: Sen. Tanya Cook of District 13 in south central Omaha. 

 

In 2011, Cook introduced and succeeded in passing a bill that would alter existing Nebraska law that allowed police to stop and detain a motorist for having an air freshener, rosary, tassel or other object hanging from a rearview mirror. 

 

In Nebraska, it’s no longer a misdemeanor crime, but now a traffic violation that can bring a fine and a point assessed on your driver’s license. And it’s a secondary rather than a primary offense, meaning police can ticket you for the violation but it can’t be the primary reason they stopped you. 

 

And it doesn’t create a criminal record. 

 

In the case of Duante Wright, police in a community that borders Minneapolis pulled him over, and shortly thereafter shot and killed him. It all started with a traffic violation. The death penalty, as it were, for a traffic violation. 

 

Police say officers stopped him because his plates had expired. But he told his mother, who was on the phone with him, that he was stopped because he had air fresheners dangling from his rear-view mirror. Police say the air fresheners were noticed only after he was stopped. 

 

Even the possibility that air fresheners could have started a succession of events that led to Wright’s death has added to the outrage. Protesters have hung air fresheners on a temporary chain link security fence outside the Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, Police Department.

 

In a majority of states, including Minnesota and Nebraska, anything that can obstruct the view of a driver is illegal. Many people believe such a law enables racial profiling. 

 

So Tanya Cook decided three sessions into her first term to try to make changes in Nebraska that could at least reduce the chances of those kinds of stops here. She had become aware of the law during debate a year before on a bill that made texting while driving a secondary offense. 

 

A majority of states have an “obstruction of view” law of some kind, some more vague than others. They are included in a set of low-level offenses, “such as tinted windows or broken tail lights, that civil rights advocates complain have become common pretexts for traffic stops that too often selectively target people of color,” according to the New York Times. 

 

The Times also reported the mayor of Brooklyn Center said police should not be pulling people over because of an expired registration during the coronavirus pandemic.

 

During a hearing and debate on Cook’s bill 10 years ago, she said charging a person with a misdemeanor crime for hanging an air freshener was grossly disproportionate to the act, that law enforcement should not be able to stop and detain a person for such a vague and uncertain offense. 

 

Several years before that, an Omaha Police safety auditor had reported those types of stops were done disproportionately to minority drivers as a pretext to stop and question them, called by some a motor vehicle “stop and frisk.” 

 

The Omaha Police Department opposed Cook’s bill in part, saying reclassifying it as a secondary offense would defeat the purpose of the law, which was safe operation of a vehicle to prevent an accident. 

 

I talked this week to Cook, who term limited out of the Legislature in January 2018 and is now the National Black Caucus of State Legislators policy lead and a member of the Metropolitan Utilities District Board of Directors. She said some made fun of her “fuzzy dice bill.” 

 

“Which was fine,” she said, “because I didn’t want people to realize what I really was attempting to do, or the audience I was concerned about. … It got through because it was early, (and) their … ignorance is so pervasive that it could just go through ‘ha, ha, ha, fuzzy dice bill, she’s looking for something to get across the finish line.”

 

It passed easily on a 46-0 vote. 

 

It’s too easy to say this shows how important it is to have people of color in the Legislature and other policy making areas government, which was my first inclination as I sat down to write this.

 

That puts too much responsibility on them to not only represent their district and what’s important and interesting to them, but also to watch what every other bill and committee and interest group may be doing, Cook explained.

 

“That’s unfair. I’ve done it. I don’t want to do it anymore,” she said. “But it also lets white people off the hook … and then you’re exhausted from not only getting your own bills across the finish line but trying to make sure nothing slips through that has a disproportionate (effect).”

 

It’s everybody’s job, and not just that of the one or two Black representatives, to use their energy, and whatever political capital they have, to prioritize, navigate, communicate, she said.

 

People in the Legislature, who are by a wide majority white, just lose their minds about property taxes, she said. If they would get as excited about life and death issues for other Nebraskans, “that’s the rubric I’m looking for.” 

 

They would be doing us all a favor. 

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