Progress? VA Police Now Required To Ask Drivers About Race, Ethnicity
From the “content of our character” to the skin color on our citation.
The Democrats who control Virginia’s government have covered the Old Dominion in disgrace since taking over the state in January, but a new law that took effect Wednesday has the feel of dragging the state back to the years of segregation and Jim Crow laws.
Law enforcement officers, from local cops to the state police, are now asking — by law — the race, ethnicity and gender of every motorist pulled over for a traffic infraction.
According to WTOP-TV in the District of Columbia, the bill was the brainchild of state Del. Luke Torian, a Democrat, who claims it will help document whether police officers, county deputies or state troopers are targeting individuals based on racial bias.
“Each time a law-enforcement officer or State Police officer stops a driver of a motor vehicle, such officer shall collect the following data based on the officer’s observation or information provided to the officer by the driver: (i) the race, ethnicity, age, and gender of the person stopped; (ii) the reason for the stop; (iii) the location of the stop; (iv) whether a warning, written citation, or summons was issued or whether any person was arrested; (v) if a warning, written citation, or summons was issued or an arrest was made, the warning provided, violation charged, or crime charged; and (vi) whether the vehicle or any person was searched,” the statute states.
“The Community Policing Act prohibits law enforcement officers from engaging in bias-based profiling,” Torian said before the bill’s passage, WTOP reported.
But in the real world, the one inhabited by most motorists and police officers — the world where liberals have fanned the flames of racial hatred particularly as it applies to law enforcement officers — it’s asking for trouble.
A traffic stop isn’t the most pleasant interaction under the best of circumstances. A traffic stop that includes the gratuitous introduction of a racial element isn’t going to get any better. In fact, under the wrong circumstances, it could get considerably worse.
But the first time a motorist strenuously objects to being asked his race and engages in a “mostly peacefully protest” on the side of, say, Interstate 81 until backup units have to be called to restrain him, it’s a pretty solid bet that Democrats like Torian are going to claim officers were at fault.
On social media, the scorn poured in.
That’s not gonna lead to a massive mess up
— Luis (@luis_v__) July 1, 2020
There’s no way this could go wrong
— need s’more freedom ???? (@oglethorp12) July 1, 2020
Ahh, yes, progress.
— FM29 (@FMUSA29) July 1, 2020
That sounds…racist.
— The ‘Pubkin (@thepubkin) July 1, 2020
Wth isn’t this everything against what the left say they want. Dems always have to put people in boxes.
— Maddie Schultz (@MadisonSchult11) July 1, 2020
Of course, there was the expected defiance.
My answer will be “I choose not to respond” to every question.
— Kim (@kymberleigh_m) July 1, 2020
And even some humor (though no jokes about Gov. Ralph Northam and his infamous blackface photo, oddly enough).
If @ewarren is stopped for speeding, what will she say?
— Undead Bill Clinton (@UndeadBill) July 1, 2020
But there’s really nothing funny about it.
In proposing the bill, according to WTOP, Torian argued that a similar ordinance in D.C. had the result of proving minorities are targeted by law enforcement more than whites — and that’s obviously the intent of the bill here.
But whatever gains the left hopes to make in the area of equality, it’s destroying them with one more step toward making race the central element of every human interaction in the United States.
That’s exactly the opposite of that noble dream the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described during the March on Washington almost 60 years ago, when he spoke of a world where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
That’s clearly not the United States of 2020.
Democrats are bringing back racism and segregation. Tha party of slavery strikes again.
— Resist Leftist Hate ?? (@Anabel_Florida) July 1, 2020
The further away King’s ringing speech gets in time, the further away the country seems to get from the goal.
And it’s Democrats such as the current masters of the Virginia legislature and the state’s Executive Mansion who are doing the most to keep things that way.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
