When Philadelphia's mayor signs landmark legislation as soon as this week, the city will become the first major U.S. city to ban police from stopping drivers for low-level traffic violations — stops that studies show target Black drivers at disproportionately higher rates.

The Driving Equality Bill, passed 14-2 by the city council on Oct. 14, categorizes certain motor vehicle code violations as "primary violations," which allow officers to pull people over in the name of public safety, and "secondary violations" that don't meet the criteria for a lawful traffic stop, according to the office of Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, who authored the bill.

The bill will take effect 120 days after Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney signs it into law, which his office said he intends to do.

While Philadelphia is the largest city to ban such traffic stops, some local and state governments have also enacted similar policies.

In September, Ramsey County, Minnesota, announced prosecutors will no longer pursue cases against people who are unfairly targeted and detained during non-public safety stops. The new policy comes five years after former St. Anthony Police Department officer Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot Philando Castile seven times during a traffic stop in 2016 over a broken tail light, prosecutors said.

In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey announced in August that the city's police officers will no longer conduct pretextual traffic stops for low-level offenses as part of his 2022 budget proposal. Officers are prohibited from making pretextual stops for "expired tabs, an item dangling from a mirror, or an expired license," according to a city news release.

In March, Virginia became the first state to prohibit these stops within three months of the bill's introduction. Law enforcement officers cannot lawfully stop motorists for driving without a light illuminating a license plate, without brake lights or a high mount stop light, and with certain sun-shading materials and tinting films, according to the legislation.

"The bill also provides that no law-enforcement officer may lawfully stop, search, or seize any person, place, or thing solely on the basis of the odor of marijuana," the Virginia bill states.

The police department is on board

Dennis Jay Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told CNN that there are "risks in both directions" in allowing police to make traffic stops for minor violations and prohibiting them altogether.

"The danger of not eliminating them is that it drives a wedge between the public and the police," Kenney said. "If you're tired of driving while Black, you're less likely to cooperate during these stops."

"The risk in the other direction, in the case of traffic safety, is that we prohibit some behavior and require you to have taillights because it's safer, people can more readily stop behind you. So, by saying these violations no longer matter, then to the extent that they impact public safety, then public safety will be negatively impacted," Kenney added.

Kenney said Philadelphia has decided that pretextual stops are disruptive and the risk to the relationship between the police and the community "is greater than the likely pay off of getting a bad guy every now and then."

Once the Driving Equality Bill is signed into law, the Philadelphia police will work on directive amendments and necessary training. Max Weisman, a spokesperson for Councilmember Thomas, said the police department has exhibited support for the bill and has negotiated in "good faith."

The bill was informed by the development of the Bailey pilot program, a result of the 2011 settlement agreement of Bailey v. City of Philadelphia, which requires the police department to collect data on all stop-and-frisks and store it in an electronic database. The lawsuit alleged that thousands of people in Philadelphia are illegally stopped, frisked and detained by police officers.

Low-level offenses such as registration plate and bumper issues will now be categorized as secondary offenses, which bar officers from conducting traffic stops, unless there is an additional high-level safety violation, according to the Philadelphia police department.

"We believe this is a fair and balanced approach to addressing racial disparity without compromising public safety," the department said in a statement. "This modified enforcement model for car stops furthers the Department's priority of addressing the issue of racial disparity in the Department's investigative stops and complements the Department's efforts to address these same issues in pedestrian stops."

'A traffic stop is a rite of passage'

Councilmember Thomas introduced the bill with nine cosponsors in October 2020, aiming to address "the tension between police and community members by removing negative interactions," according to his office.

"I am humbled by every person who told my office of the humiliation and trauma experienced in some of these traffic stops," Thomas said. "Too many people who look like me, a traffic stop is a rite of passage — we pick out cars, we determine routes, we plan our social interactions around the fact that it is likely that we will be pulled over by police."

The legislation is also part of a package including his companion bill that mandates a public, searchable database of traffic stops that will be published monthly. The police department will be required to compile digital records of which officers conduct traffic stops, who was stopped, the reason for the stop, and other data that will be included in the database.

"These bills end the traffic stops that promote discrimination while keeping the traffic stops that promote public safety," his office said in a press release. "This approach seeks to redirect police time and resources towards keeping Philadelphians safe while removing negative interactions that widen the divide and perpetuate mistrust."

The new legislation does not change the motor vehicle code that drivers are legally required to follow, but those who commit minor infractions now only receive a warning or citation by mail.

The bill only removes the enforcement mechanism of a traffic stop, according to Weisman. It designates seven secondary violations that prohibit traffic stops, including bumper issues, minor obstructions, broken lights, and a license plate that is not visible or clearly displayed.

Minor infractions such as broken taillights, the smell of marijuana, improperly displayed registration stickers or hanging items from a car's rearview mirror have been criticized as a pretext for racially motivated traffic stops.

Black drivers, which comprise 48% of Philadelphia's population, accounted for 72% of the nearly 310,000 traffic stops by police officers between October 2018 and September 2019, according to data from the Defender Association of Philadelphia. As of this year, Black drivers account for 67% of stops compared to just 12% of White drivers, the data shows.

Alan Tauber, the acting chief defender for the Defender Association for Philadelphia, said the legislation is a "great first step to building more trust between our police and communities of color," adding, "We're hopeful that passage of the Driving Equality Bill is just the beginning of informed and meaningful conversations about positive changes to our justice system that will benefit all Philadelphians."

"I can remember clearly the first time my parents had the talk with my brother and I [sic].

And no, we aren’t talking the birds and the bees.

My parents were trying to explain to their elementary-aged children that we were different and encounters with the police could be life or death.

They told us to address officers like we were taught to speak to all adults: “Yes sir, no sir. Yes mam, no mam.”

Don’t make sudden movements.

Don’t put our hands in our pockets.

Don’t look down or grab anything without permission first.

Follow their commands without question.

And for reasons I would only understand when I was an adult, it was more important for my brother to do all of these things right.

We were taught to know our rights, but under no circumstances should we verbally defend ourselves—no matter what is said by an officer.

This conversation was sparked after an officer pulled over my father just a block from our house. The officer asked my father multiple times what he did for a living to afford his car—he owned a construction company.

Something similar would happen to my two black cousins and I [sic] years later as teenagers.

The officer pulled us over as we were turning onto my street and asked what we were doing in that neighborhood.

I told him I lived there. He asked us to get out of the car.

At that moment, I remembered ‘the talk’ and the biggest thing my parents emphasized: these encounters may not always be fair but what is most important is to come home."

Jessica Porter is a reporter with thedenverchannel.com.

There's a renewed push to reform qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that protects police officers, along with some others, from civil lawsuits.

In Congress, Sen. Justin Amash of Michigan proposed a bill to eliminate qualified immunity entirely. It has bipartisan support.

Understanding why qualified immunity was established could help inform a vision for the future.

Imagine a scenario where you're walking down the street and someone clearly violates your rights. The rule of law says they should be held accountable and you'd expect that they would. But can the same be said about police officers who violate a person’s rights?

Qualified immunity protects public employees, like police officers, from being held personally liable for knowingly violating someone else’s rights, as long as the officer didn’t break any “clearly-established” laws in the process.

Critics argue qualified immunity tilts the scales of justice and makes it hard to hold officers accountable for crimes they admit to committing.

The legal path that led to qualified immunity started with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Congress declared that every American has the right to sue any public employees who violate their rights.

Then, in the late 1960s, a Supreme Court ruling would start morphing the concept into what we know today.

It was 1967 when the court granted exceptions to police officers accused of violating rights if they acted in good faith and believed their actions were within the law. Another ruling, in 1982, shifted the burden entirely to the citizen, requiring they prove the officer’s actions broke a “clearly-established” right.

That means presenting a case where the Supreme Court found an official guilty of the same “particular conduct” under the same “specific context” as is being alleged. Without it, the officer is protected from liability.

The Supreme Court granted one exception for a particularly cruel case in 2002.

In June 2020, the Court declined to take up a petition asking it to re-examine qualified immunity. The order was unsigned, and Justice Clarence Thomas was the only one to write a dissent.

He wrote the “qualified immunity doctrine appears to stray from the statutory text.”

Justice Thomas and Justice Sonia Sotomayor have urged the court to take up the doctrine multiple times in the past. In 2018, Justice Ruth Bader-Ginsburg joined in a dissent authored by Justice Sotomayor. It said that the way the Court previously ruled on qualified immunity had established “an absolute shield for law enforcement officers.”

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — When you pass a police officer on the street, what do you see? For San Francisco Police Officer Shante Williams, it’s a complicated answer.

“The uniform has a history,” said Officer Williams. “There have been a lot of awful things that this uniform has represented.”

Williams joined the force to write a new chapter in that history, in hopes of making present-day policing different from the past.

He came from humble beginnings, growing up in the projects. He learned what community distrust looked like at an early age from his environment, but he saw beyond perception. He saw the chance to help.

“It hurts when you're in the community that you love, that you want to service, and just because you're doing your job, ‘Oh, you're a sell out’ or ‘You're an Uncle Tom. You're just doing this for your boys.’ No, I'm doing this for the community. I'm doing this for me. I'm doing this for you,” said Williams of the stereotypes he fights to break in the community each day.

Even after years of facing negativity and distrust, Williams was not prepared for what was to come in 2020. The death of George Floyd rocked his profession as it rocked the world.

“George Floyd was just like, enough," he said. "And if people think that looking at that video and being a Black man and being a police officer, that I didn't feel the way that they felt, I saw the uniform and I was disgusted. I saw another human being kill another human being and I was disgusted.”

George Floyd’s death left this officer wondering where was his place in this moment, and in this nation?

“I had conversations, I got phone calls, 'Are you Black or are you blue?” recounted Williams. “Why can't I be proud of both? Why can’t I be proud to be a Black man, and why can't I be proud to be a Black police officer? And why can’t I be ashamed of also being a police officer because one of my own committed a heinous act?

For officers of color across the country, the movement for social justice forced an identity crisis in the midst of the community crisis.

“It made my job difficult, but I signed up for difficult,” said Williams.

As the trial for Floyd’s killing is getting started, Williams said he has a message for the community from an officer wanting to build bridges, not separations between his department and the community.

“On the eve of the trial, someone lost their life,” said Williams. “I'm very sorry for that family. I'm very sorry for that community. I'm very sorry for the world. I'm very sorry for whoever saw that video. Your pain is my pain, I feel it too. I'm a Black man. I'm a Black police officer, and regardless if he was Black, blue, purple or yellow, that man was killed. That officer should be held accountable, and that should be the end of it.”

To make an impact in such a critical time, Officer Williams took on a new challenge: leadership in the San Francisco Police Officers Association. He’s breaking barriers alongside the new Vice President, Lieutenant Tracy McCray.

The two worked together patrolling the housing projects in San Francisco for years. It was a time they both hold dear, helping families similar to their own.

Lt. McCray has been on a mission since she took on her leadership position to break down old policy, procedure and bring it into the present day.

She’s used to making history. She’s the, “first female, first Black female, first lesbian female to hold this title in this organization,” she said. Next on her list is introducing better training and for her police department to better interact with the community.

Together, Lt. McCray and Officer Williams believe they are paving the way for a new kind of officer.

“We have policies that are like 25 years old, and we can’t have that,” said McCray. “You need to be updating and making sure you’re on the forefront of change and directing and driving that change.”

The department has already incorporated “8 Can’t Wait” a list of eight policing reforms called for by the community.

Lt. McCray said she wants the community to know this department is trying to show progress, not just talk about it.

“I would hope people could come out and say, police organizations, police departments, that we did listen. We did buy into change. We weren’t the obstructionists the critics think we are,” she said.

“If you don't change, you're going to get run over,” said Williams. “And when I say run over, you're going to be a victim to your own stupidity. You have to be willing to change.”

The San Francisco Police Department saw many cops unwilling to accept the change. Record numbers of officers resigned in just the first half of last year. The officers still standing are glad those who resisted are gone.

“What this year has done as far as the growth of the department is….we're all looking for that one person to get them out of our profession because we hold this near and dear to our heart,” said Williams.

Williams said he and Lt. McCray are encouraging officers to speak up and call out the "bad apples," so officers who are doing the right thing are not grouped with those who are not.

This culture shift isn’t the only change. The police department is moving funding from policing to community initiatives, and these cops welcome it.

“I think police officers need to stop being so sensitive thinking that we're going to lose our jobs,” said Williams. “There's a lot of work to be done in every single community, and we don't have to do it all. That can be shared. There are a lot of calls for service that we go to that can be better served by someone with a higher level of training.”

Lt. McCray agrees that more social workers and specially-trained medical professionals could handle some mental health calls. However, she said police officers need more training in that area, too.

“We can re-imagine a whole bunch of stuff, but the reality is we are so far away from that it’s going to take years,” said Lt. McCray of separating policing from mental health crisis response.

She said she hopes cities and departments will invest in this idea for the long-term.

These officers’ work supporting progress is more important than ever as the trial for George Floyd’s killing begins.

“We're all are held hostage by this one act,” said Lt. McCray. “We're all condemned now, you know, because sometimes you put on the uniform, they see the uniform they don't see the person wearing it.”

But these two aren’t giving up because of that. They’re just getting started.

“How do we build trust? You got to get out,” said Officer Williams. “You've got to meet people.

They have hope that in time, the small changes they make today will soon be seen as the first steps in a new era of policing.