Freedom to Walk Campaign

The problem with jaywalking laws

• Ongoing criminalization of low-income Black and Brown communities. Jaywalking is categorized with other low-level ‘quality of life’ infractions. This refers to a practice of heavily policing a number of normally non-criminal activities and everyday behavior such as standing, sleeping, and congregating in public spaces, as well as minor offenses such as public urination, panhandling, littering, and unlicensed street vending because, the argument goes, if left unchecked, these minor offenses will lead to an explosion of serious crime. Police officers rarely if ever issue citations for these infractions in white, wealthy neighborhoods. This ongoing form of police harassment of Black and Latinx communities, people experiencing homelessness, and people with disabilities can cause trauma, and enforcement of minor infractions has led to police violence. 
• California is in the process of reforming its laws regarding the use of public spaces. Several categories of infractions have already been eliminated in recent years at the state level, including vending without a permit and possession of marijuana. It’s time to add jaywalking to this list.

• The criminalization of crossing the street mid-block often results in hundreds of dollars in fines and fees people cannot afford to pay. In some counties, outstanding jaywalking tickets can be the pretext for warrants and arrests for people who either do not pay or fail to appear in court. Low-income people who commit minor offenses such as jaywalking can end up saddled with fines, fees and penalties that drive them deeper into poverty. This is part of a long history of police departments overly enforcing such minor infractions because of government dependence on the criminal justice system to raise revenue. California has been moving away from these kinds of regressive approaches to revenue-raising. Fines for jaywalking, an infraction that causes no injury to the community, should be considered in the same category and should likewise be eliminated.

• Our streets are not designed to make walking safe or convenient, particularly in our most disadvantaged communities. In the absence of safe and accessible pedestrian infrastructure,  residents do their best to navigate across major roads with high-speed traffic and inadequate crossings. Dangerous roads, which lack adequate crossings, lighting, and sidewalks, are typically concentrated in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Because of this, law enforcement often polices communities for their lack of governmental services and improper land use planning; issues that white affluent neighborhoods do not similarly face.

• Jaywalking laws were originally created by auto industry-aligned special interest groups in the 1930s during the rise of mass automobile ownership. Prior to the emergence of cars in cities, no such concept existed; pedestrians had free run of the public right-of-way. But, as city streets became sites of increasing carnage in the early days of America’s auto era (about 200,000 Americans (many of them children) were killed by cars in the 1920s), towns and cities began to enact low-speed limits to protect other street users. Automakers and owners sought regulations that would shift responsibility away from drivers and onto pedestrians. Jaywalking laws effectively fence in people traveling on foot so that cars can travel at unsafe speeds, endangering children, seniors, and other vulnerable road users. It’s time to take back our streets.

• Jaywalking represents a rational adaptation to an unfriendly built environment: Signal timing that prioritizes vehicular traffic, lack of crossings between common destinations, long distances between crosswalks are all characteristics of an unfriendly built environment. In some cases, jaywalking is driven by the fear of crime, particularly in low-income communities. Jaywalking is often the most rational choice among bad options. For example, an investigation into the nation-leading pedestrian deaths in Arizona by the Arizona Republic last year found only about a third of the pedestrians killed in Phoenix were near (within 500 feet of) a crosswalk. The reporters concluded there was a need for more crosswalks, not a crackdown on jaywalkers. Criminalizing a rational, predictable response to poor infrastructure is unjust.