Walking while Black shouldn’t be dangerous or expensive. We must decriminalize jaywalking
In April 2017, Nandi Cain Jr., who is Black, was beaten by a Sacramento police officer. Following a verbal altercation, Officer Anthony Figueroa threw Cain to the ground and punched him repeatedly.
Cain’s alleged offense? Jaywalking. The city of Sacramento later settled a lawsuit with Cain for $550,000, and agreed to several police procedure changes, including additional monitoring and data collection.
Black adults in California’s 15 largest law enforcement jurisdictions were almost 10 times more likely than white adults to be cited for minor infractions, like jaywalking, according to a 2020 study by a Bay Area civil rights committee. The same study found that Latinos were also nearly six times more likely to receive citations.
For people of color, these encounters with law enforcement can be fatal. Last September, two Orange County Sheriff’s deputies killed Kurt Reinhold, a homeless Black man, after they stopped him for allegedly jaywalking. In 2018, Chinedu Okobi was walking down El Camino Real in Millbrae when a sheriff’s deputy approached him for allegedly jaywalking and subsequently tased him. He died after going into cardiac arrest.
Jaywalking laws provide yet another avenue for the racial biases of law enforcement to cause harm. A law proposed by San Francisco Assemblyman Phil Ting would finally decriminalize jaywalking and give people the freedom to walk safely in their neighborhoods.
“This is common behavior that has been criminalized,” Ting said. “What may seem like a very simple situation — a traffic stop or people just crossing the street — can sometimes (yield) dire consequences.”
Under Assembly Bill 1238, The Freedom To Walk Act, law enforcement officials can still cite someone who is acting unsafely or getting in the way of traffic, but the bill removes the “arbitrary enforcement” of jaywalking laws, Ting said. AB 1238 would stop law enforcement officials from using jaywalking as an excuse to stop people of color.
In low-income neighborhoods — where sufficient crossing infrastructure is often lacking — citations for minor infractions can become a heavy financial burden. According to Ting, after added fees are tacked on, tickets for jaywalking can cost anywhere from $250 to $1,000.
It boils down to this: There’s absolutely no reason why jaywalking should still be a crime.
Let’s consider the history of this “crime.” In the 1920s, with more and more vehicles on the road, the number of people killed by cars skyrocketed. In an attempt to blame pedestrians — not cars — for these deaths, the auto industry invented jaywalking laws.
“In the early days of the automobile, it was drivers’ job to avoid you, not your job to avoid them,” Peter Norton, University of Virginia historian and author of “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City,” told Vox. “But under the new model, streets became a place for cars — and as a pedestrian, it’s your fault if you get hit.”
These days, in San Francisco, car accidents involving pedestrians and bikers are a growing concern among residents. Since 2014, more than 200 people have been killed and 20,000 have been injured in traffic incidents in the city. When asked whether decriminalizing jaywalking might result in additional deaths in his district, Ting said “no, not at all.”
“It isn’t the pedestrian that’s usually the problem, it’s usually the person behind the wheel,” Ting said. “No pedestrian is going to cross a street thinking that there’s a car that may collide with them because they know they’re going to lose in that collision.”
Virginia has already decriminalized jaywalking. Pedestrians are legally allowed to cross wherever they want in the United Kingdom, which has a much higher walking rate and about half as many pedestrian deaths as the U.S. The Netherlands has three times fewer traffic deaths per capita than the U.S., and legally allows pedestrians to jaywalk.
“Most countries would consider the concept of jaywalking a scam that Americans have been conditioned to believe is normal,” transportation reporter Wyatt Gordon wrote in the Virginia Mercury.
The San Francisco-based campaign Vision Zero aims to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024. It’s one of several groups — including CalBike and the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition — that support AB 1238.
But the group that initially approached Ting about decriminalizing jaywalking isn’t involved in transportation at all — it’s the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area. Like the committee, Ting views AB 1238 as a piece of civil rights legislation.
The bill passed in the assembly and is now headed to the senate. This should be an obvious and easy decision for California lawmakers. Your skin color should not prevent you from safely crossing the street.
This story was originally published June 11, 2021 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Walking while Black shouldn’t be dangerous or expensive. We must decriminalize jaywalking."