Fear, mistrust, and prejudice have seemingly marked many encounters between police and African-American males — leading to deadly consequences. Dr. Juan Gilbert and his team at the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering at the University of Florida have developed the Traffic Stop app, which aims to allow both police officer and driver to stay in their vehicles for routine traffic stops, injecting a level of safety for both parties.
According to Gilbert, Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor & Chair, Computer & Information Science & Engineering Department at the University of Florida, as envisioned, the Traffic Stop app would be available to citizens for free and downloadable through the Apple App Store or Google Play. The cost would be on the law enforcement side but insurance companies and others interested in the app’s benefits could step up and provide funding.
On the driver’s side, pertinent documents would be loaded electronically and viewable within the app. In a routine traffic stop, an officer could see on his or her end a driver’s license and other pertinent information and run routine warrant checks, etc. Ostensibly, neither officer nor driver would have to leave their vehicles unless a warrant check revealed an outstanding warrant, for instance.
“We’ve heard time and time again. ‘Why did you shoot the guy? I was afraid. I feared.’ If you are in your vehicle, and they’re in their vehicle, what are you fearing at that point? I’m trying to take the fear out of the equation,” Gilbert says.
Statistics bear out that perceptions of bias against Blacks when it comes to police interaction have some basis in reality. Part of the abstract of a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper titled, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” written Dr. Roland Fryer, a Harvard University economics professor, reads: “On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities.”
However, interestingly, the abstract adds, “On the most extreme use of force — officer-involved shootings — we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account.”
Indeed, it is the national conversation over police-involved killings of Black men that prompted Gilbert, and his majority-Black team of students within UF’s Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, to seek a technological solution to a national issue.
