Discretionless Policing: Technology and the Fourth Amendment

What if we could eliminate police discretion from traffic stops by using a computer to accomplish what police officers do without racial prejudice?The technology and a plan to automate law enforcement exist, yet neither has received serious attention.An automated enforcement program would eliminate stops based on nearly all the most frequently used justifications to stop drivers, including speeding, record checks and other vehicle code violations.If the war on drugs continued to exist, it would no longer use the traffic stop.Recent federal regulatory approval of the technical standards for the federal intelligent highway initiative shows that this is a real and practicable solution to the problem of police discretion in traffic stops, one that sidesteps entrenched difficulties in Fourth Amendment law and politics.This Essay further explores a technological solution to reducing discretion in policing.