On February 12, Obama-appointed federal judge John A. Gibney Jr. declared it unconstitutional for Richmond police to stop minority motorists. At least, that’s what the logic of his decision suggests.

That’s because Gibney based his decision on the fact that Richmond police stop fewer white motorists (based on the data presented to Gibney) than those who are not white, a difference he attributed to historic discrimination rather than to any individualized facts on the ground.

The only apparent way local police could remedy this past discrimination would be to either implement racial quotas for traffic stops—meaning police would have to stop equal numbers of motorists of each race regardless of any underlying criminal conduct—or simply cease to stop minority motorists—regardless of any legal justification.

Neither is acceptable.

While this is shocking on its face, the details only make it worse. That’s because Gibney’s decision is based on the Richmond Police Department’s December 2020 stop and subsequent arrest of Keith Rodney Moore. Moore, a convicted felon, fled from officers when they tried to pull him over, but they ultimately caught him, arrested him, and charged him with being a felon in possession of a firearm after they found a gun in his car.

When a grand jury indicted him, Moore moved to dismiss the charges, “claiming that RPD’s officers selectively stop Black people,” and that this “selective enforcement” led to his charges—not, of course, his own criminal conduct.

To support his claim, he introduced the testimony of two expert witnesses.

One, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, used data provided by the Richmond Police Department to show that minority motorists had a higher likelihood of being stopped by police than white motorists. Crucially, however, the professor clarified that with the limitations of the data, he could not determine whether there was any “statistical significance of the relationship between a driver’s race and the rate at which they were stopped” by police. Moreover, the judge conceded that he did “not purport to determine whether race caused a particular stop.” And the data itself was not well-suited to the type of analysis conducted by the professor.

The other expert witness, an assistant professor of history at Old Dominion University, was meant to fill in these shortcomings and offer testimony “that no one can refute.” This entailed describing “Richmond’s history of segregation and bigotry” and explaining that “in the late twentieth century, Black neighborhoods experienced ‘more crime’ because individuals in those neighborhoods ‘ha[d] been segregated, confined, [and] given ... an inferior education.” Over time, he said, “crime is going to be the natural result, especially disproportionate to the rest of the City.”

As the state promptly pointed out, this professor wrongly impugns all policing as inherently racist and discounts “another far more plausible explanation ... that criminal activity is unfortunately disproportionately concentrated in Richmond’s minority neighborhoods.” In fact, “89% of the murders in Richmond since January 1, 2018” occurred in these predominantly minority neighborhoods.

Ignoring this hard truth, the judge instead found that the professor’s testimony “corroborates Moore’s contention that ‘[RPD] is pulling over [B]lack drivers five times more often than white drivers because those drivers are [B]lack.’” Interestingly, the judge added brackets to capitalize “Black” while leaving “white” in lowercase—a problematic practice that other courts have adopted and have appropriately been criticized for doing.

Worse still, he argued that the testimony of these two professors helped Moore prove that it was more likely than not that RPD’s traffic stops had both a discriminatory effect on nonwhite motorists and that they had a discriminatory intent behind them—even though the court acknowledged that Moore had presented no evidence to show that the officers who stopped him acted in bad faith or with “invidious” intent.

Let that sink in. This federal court judge has essentially said that any minority driver pulled over in the state of Virginia can now have his or her charges dismissed just because he or she isn’t white. And given his reliance on the testimony about “the Confederate foundations of RPD” and “Richmond’s racialized zoning, redlining,” there’s no apparent method for Richmond police to cure their supposed problematic practices absent adopting racial quotas for police stops, which would be blatantly unconstitutional.

What the Biden administration could not accomplish with legislation through the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, this federal judge has essentially implemented through a deeply flawed constitutional decision. Hopefully, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals will reverse it. If not, it’s the citizens of Richmond—of all races—who will pay the price in terms of under-policing and the concomitant increase in crime that is sure to follow.