PRINCETON: Police chief resists renewed calls to stop random license plate checks, focus more on speeding

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton Police Chief Nicholas K. Sutter on Monday resisted renewed calls from a councilwoman that officers “stop” doing random license plate check to focus instead on what she called more pressing local concerns about speeding.
Councilwoman Jenny Crumiller returned to an issue that she had raised in July, in a move that would result in police doing fewer warrant arrests that a lot of times are a result of police running a plate and finding the driver has an outstanding violation. Officials have expressed concern about a racial disparity in warrant arrests and traffic stops, with Ms. Crumiller saying at the time that she did not “care about warrants” from people and believed random checks by police were “fishing” expeditions.
From the dais Monday night, she was in explicit in calling for police to “stop” random license plate checks and asked Chief Sutter why the department does them in the first place.
“ I don’t think our residents really want the police doing that. They would rather them do speeding,” Ms. Crumiller told the chief.
For his part, the chief said those checks have been “a means of proactive enforcement since the Division of Motor Vehicles was established.” He later called them a “proven, best practice and proactive means of both motor vehicle enforcement and criminal apprehension” and warned Ms. Crumiller what would happen if officials handcuffed police from doing them.
“If you prohibited our officers from running random plates,” he told her, “you are not only jeopardizing the safety of the community but the safety of the officers.”
He said it was “not true” that random checks are leading to a majority of warrant arrests.
But a second member of the governing body weighed in, with Councilman Patrick Simon asking the chief if officers did random checks even when there is no indication of a crime or misdemeanor.
“Not just our officers, officers nationally, and they’ve been doing that, as I said, since police radios were invented and we were able to access Division of Motor Vehicle files,” responded the chief.
Officials, though, see increased enforcement as a catch-22. On the one hand, police cracking down on speeders could also lead to people getting in trouble for other violations, like a warrant for an unpaid parking ticket, and compounding “some of the biases in the system,” in the words of one official.
“But I think that there’s a tension there,” Councilwoman Heather H. Howard said. “Because as we’ve learned this year, every time you have law enforcement engagement with somebody in a traffic context, there’s potential for issues.”
In February, a Princeton University professor was stopped for speeding in town and later found to have warrants for unpaid parking tickets. The incident initially raised questions about the way the professor, Imani Perry claimed she was treated, later focusing attention on the use of warrants for minor offenses.
Police officers do not have the discretion to ignore an arrest warrant out for someone.
“…One of the things that we are wrestling with nationally, at the state level and locally is the bias built into the court system and it comes down all the way through to warrant arrests,” Mr. Simon said to the chief. “If there’s a disproportionate number of warrants out there for minorities, for people who are poor, for people of color, and everything else you just said about random vehicle checks takes place, then it will exacerbate the problem.”
“Everyone is concerned about speeding,” Ms. Crumiller said in adding she is getting pressure from residents about why the town is not doing enough about the problem. The department, in its reports to the governing body, showed it had issued 41 speeding tickets in July, compared to 104 in July 2015.
She asked Chief Sutter whether the department could “drastically” increase speeding enforcement in a community that she said seems not to be known for its “strict” enforcement of that violation.
“We aggressively enforce motor vehicle safety, pedestrian safety. I can assure you of that,” he said. “The one thing that I always get back to when it comes to motor vehicle enforcement is, it’s not summonses. We never talk, ever, in policing about motor vehicle enforcement or enforcement of any kind being a revenue generator. We do it to mitigate traffic problems.”