City council members and civil rights groups call for suspending pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville
Some City Council members and civil rights organizations have called for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office to suspend all pedestrian ticket writing over concerns officers are targeting blacks and other residents of the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
Isaiah Rumlin, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, and the Rev. Levy Wilcox of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s local branch, said in a news release Tuesday that while public safety was a great concern,
so was the possibility that the Sheriff’s Office had been discriminating against African-Americans by selectively enforcing sometimes obscure pedestrian statutes...
The calls from the civil rights organizations come two weeks after the Times-Union and ProPublica reported that a disproportionate number of the more than 2,200 pedestrian tickets issued from 2012 to 2017 had been given to blacks. Those tickets, issued for everything from jaywalking to walking on the wrong side of the road, can have an impact on people’s driver’s licenses and, if unpaid, their credit ratings...
In the last five years, according to an analysis by the Times-Union and ProPublica, blacks received 55 percent of all pedestrian tickets in Jacksonville, while only making up 29 percent of the population. Blacks receive a higher percentage of tickets in Duval County than any other large county in Florida. Blacks in Jacksonville were nearly three times as likely as whites to be ticketed for a pedestrian violation. Residents of the city’s three poorest ZIP codes were about six times as likely to receive a pedestrian citation as those living in the city’s other, more affluent 34 ZIP codes.
Tickets for some of the less well-known pedestrian statutes were issued even more disproportionately to blacks. Seventy-eight percent of all tickets written for “walking in the roadway where sidewalks are provided” were issued to blacks.
As well, blacks were issued 68 percent of all tickets for “failing to cross the road at a right angle or shortest route.”
While the Sheriff’s Office said tickets were primarily written to help limit deadly accidents in a city with dangerously high numbers of fatal crashes,
the analysis showed there is no strong relationship between where tickets are being issued and where pedestrians are being killed...
Just one of the top six census tracts in Jacksonville for pedestrian deaths was among the top six for tickets. Indeed, one of the deadliest tracts – six deaths – saw just 10 tickets in five years. The neighborhood with the most tickets had just two deaths.
Williams said last month that there was no effort to target African-Americans, and his office argued that the racial breakdown of those receiving tickets was merely a reflection of who was committing the violations.
The Sheriff’s Office also said the tickets could be a useful tool for fighting crime. Stopping people for pedestrian violations, the the Sheriff’s Office said, gave officers probable cause to question and perhaps search individuals suspected of having drugs or weapons.
Frazier, the Northside Coalition spokesman, said in a statement that the sheriff and the mayor should “should stop tap dancing around the truth” and admit officers were engaging in “racially discriminatory police tactics.”
“The numbers don’t lie,” Frazier said...
Both the sheriff and the mayor have said the primary goal of the tickets is saving lives.
However, despite a sustained effort at enforcing pedestrian statutes, the number of pedestrians killed each year in Jacksonville has gone up...
Brown told the Times-Union and ProPublica on Tuesday that state Rep. Kim Daniels intended to introduce legislation in Tallahassee that would regulate the tickets, specifically, that a warning be issued before a citation.
“The racially disproportionate ticket writing statistics are troubling,” Dennis said in the news release. He called the idea of suspending the ticket writing “a reasonable request.”..
whole article in link BTW