Police Misconduct

Police brutality and racial inequities in criminal justice must be addressed by advocates and agencies aiming to reduce traffic fatalities. That's the key takeaway from a Vision Zero Cities panel yesterday on police violence and traffic enforcement. "Vision Zero cannot be a reason to overly-police black and brown bodies," said Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition Executive Director Tamika Butler. "You can’t ignore the country we live in."

Police and city planners in Sacramento have come under scrutiny in the weeks since police were caught on tape assaulting Nandi Cain, Jr., a black man, during a jaywalking stop. Cain, who was legally using an unmarked crosswalk, has since filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city. Now, reporters are looking into why there are so few marked crosswalks in one of Sacramento's poorest areas.

If you follow @placardabuse on Twitter, you'll see plenty of evidence that officers are still getting away with obscuring their license plates to evade tolls and traffic enforcement cameras.

When most cities try to make biking a bigger part of their transportation systems, they use a standard checklist: comfortable biking networks, how-to-ride classes, traffic-law enforcement. The full list is sometimes called the “Five E’s.” A first-of-its-kind survey conducted by Rutgers academics Charles Brown and James Sinclair shows that when you look at biking from the perspective of a Black or Latino American, the Five E’s are missing a lot.

With renewed public attention on the excessive criminalization of poor people and people of color, some transit agencies and law enforcement officials are reevaluating their fare evasion policies.

"Where do things stand now?" I asked Adonia Lugo as we organized potential discussion themes ahead of this Sunday's Untokening event.

Austin police were captured on video beating a group of "jaywalkers" into submission late last Wednesday in an incident that reeks of racial profiling.

A resident of Upper Manhattan who said she was almost hit, and was then harassed, by NYPD officers as she rode her bike has given up on her complaint to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which made no progress on the case for close to a year after the incident.