Drivers across Mobile encountered a noticeably heavier police presence the weekend of March 8-9, 2008, as officers set up a string of checkpoints in the downtown area, along the Causeway and in Midtown, part of what appeared to be a coordinated push to check licenses, registrations and proof of insurance.
On the evening of Saturday, March 8, six patrol cars and a larger-than-usual contingent of officers gathered in the vacant lot on the northeast corner of Broad Street and Government Street. A generator and a bank of high-intensity lights lit the site while one officer worked westbound traffic, checking licenses and insurance as his colleagues waited nearby. A similar operation was running at the same time just past the eastern mouth of the Bankhead Tunnel, catching traffic headed east on the Causeway toward Baldwin County.
The following day, a separate checkpoint drew eight officers and eight cruisers to the intersection of Upham Street and Old Shell Road in Midtown. Not long after that stop wrapped up, a line of police cruisers was seen moving east on Government Street, apparently headed toward another checkpoint elsewhere in the city.
Checkpoints of this kind are a routine tool for enforcing traffic and insurance laws, and Mobile police have used them for years to catch uninsured and unlicensed drivers. But the scale of the weekend operation, spanning multiple high-traffic corridors over back-to-back days, raised a question for at least some residents: whether that concentration of manpower is the best use of officers’ time while the city is also contending with a rise in violent crime and robberies.
The concern is not abstract for business owners in some of the areas most affected by that crime spike. One business owner in the Loop business district described the anxiety of wondering, night after night, whether her shop would be the next target amid a run of armed robberies in the area. For her and others like her, a highly visible traffic checkpoint can feel like a mismatch of priorities when what worries her most is the threat of armed robbery, not an expired insurance card.
The tension points to a broader challenge facing police departments in mid-sized cities like Mobile: with finite staffing, every hour devoted to one kind of enforcement is an hour not spent on another. Traffic and insurance checkpoints generate real public-safety benefits, from getting uninsured drivers off the road to occasionally turning up outstanding warrants or contraband during a stop. Whether that trade-off makes sense during a period of rising violent crime is a judgment call department leadership has to make, and one residents and business owners are increasingly asking about.