Tag: automated enforcement

what is public safety?

Dan Allison2 Comments

This post is a response to the Sacramento City Council meeting last Tuesday on the FY 2024-2025 budget adoption.

A number of people spoke on the budget, the majority of them downtown power brokers who were adamant that the police department budget not be reduced. They painted a picture of lawlessness in the central city that could only be reversed by not only not reducing, but increasing the police budget. Most of the problem was blamed on unhoused people, who were presented as violent drug addicts and criminals (never mind the white collar crime going on inside the buildings). Mayor Steinberg right off the bat said that the police budget was being increased, not reduced, but that did not prevent the speakers from claiming that it was being reduced. Several speakers used the term ‘defund the police’, which was originally an effort to reduce police budgets to force the police to be more accountable to the people, but has now been weaponized by pro-police people to suggest that every effort to hold police accountable is an effort to defund the police. One speaker attacked Councilmember Valenzuela, suggesting that she was personally responsible for all the problems in the central city.

To say the least, I was very disturbed by these messages. These are people of great privilege, asking that the city elevate their privilege over other citizens.

Not one of these central city people spoke about the epidemic of traffic violence that is harming people more than traditional crime. Several city council members did speak about this, but none of the downtown power brokers.

None of the power brokers even mentioned other parts of the city. Were they concerned about crime elsewhere? Apparently not.

Only one of the people who spoke in favor of the police budget appeared to be a person of color. He was not from the central city, and expressed ambivalence about police, acknowledging that he was concerned about crime related to his business, but also that many people were uncomfortable about the police.

Not one person from the low-income parts of the city spoke in favor of the police, or the police budget. There is a deep, and well deserved, distrust of the police in large parts of the city. Police have served as oppressors and killers in many, many incidents. Take a moment to think about all the incidents where the police escalated the situation, and then started shooting. Think about the incidents where they showed up and started shooting before they even knew what was going on, and killed innocent people. Think about the incidents where an unarmed person was running away ‘resisting arrest’ and the police shot them in the back. This is a reality that low-income people of color live with and are traumatized by.

In my view, police do not keep us safe. They respond to incidents involving bullets and knives. They often don’t respond to other incidents, or respond very slowly. And it is always response, never prevention.

What does this have to do with traffic violence and safe streets?

The police budget takes a large and growing part of the city budget. These are dollars that could be spent on solving problems, making the city a safer place, but instead they go to the police, who have only one solution, themselves. Councilmember Valenzuela made an effort to keep personal in internal affairs, the police who investigate police malfeasance and crime, but was rebuffed by Police Chief Kathy Lester who doesn’t believe internal affairs is important. Several times the issue came up, as it has many times before, about transferring a small part of the police budget to efforts that actually make a difference, such as Department of Community Response, but no action was taken.

The number of deaths in the city from traffic violence is larger than the number from homicide. Yet the city has only eight traffic enforcement officers. Eight, out of nearly 700 sworn officers (there are others who work for the department but are not officers). This understaffing is a choice that the police department makes, it was not forced on them by anyone else. It reflects their attitude that people who die by guns and knives are worth notice, but people who die by traffic violence are not. It also reflects their attitude that it is better to respond to violence than prevent violence.

I am not in favor of direct traffic enforcement by police. Of the few stops that occur, they are almost all pretextual, meaning that the police officer has stopped the person for a traffic violation, but really is seeking other violations. Most stops are of people of color, as documented by the police’s own data. These stops not infrequently escalate, escalation as often on the part of the officer as the person stopped. Some of these stops result in death.

Automated enforcement is the answer to most traffic enforcement. The city had a red light camera program, but when the county dropped it, so did the city. The police made no request to continue to program. Though the city has encouraged the legislature to pass and the governor to sign automated speed enforcement, the police have been silent. Again, an attitude that only an officer can enforce the law, technology cannot.

I have watched police officers routinely ignore traffic violations, just sitting around waiting for something ‘important’ to happen.

So what is public safety? Public safety is when:

  • resources are spent equally on protecting all citizens, not just the privileged
  • police and the city as a whole focuses on reparation, reinvestment, and dialog to heal the trauma created by police oppression
  • police allocate their officers and other resources based on actual threats to the public safety, not on outmoded perceptions
  • the city reallocates budget to those programs that are making a positive difference in people’s lives, not just increasing the budget of the loudest voices

I know I’ll lose some readers with this post. I know that some people concerned about traffic violence and safe streets are also supporters of the police and of direct traffic enforcement. Sorry to see you go. But I can no longer be silent when I see police and pro-police people claiming the right to use the term ‘public safety’ for their own benefit, to the detriment of others.

support AB-645 speed camera bill

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

California Assembly Bill ‘AB-645: Vehicles: speed safety system pilot program‘ is going to be before the Assembly Appropriations Committee shortly. Though it breezed through the Assembly Transportation Committee, it faces challenges in Appropriations. Chair Rendon is rarely a supporter of safe streets, and has killed a lot of street safety bills in his committee, so it is important that the public make it clear how important this bill is.

Walk San Francisco is sponsoring a letter writing campaign to Anthony Rendon and Chris Herndon (as are many other organizations, you can check your favorite walking/bicycling advocacy organizations) at https://walksf.org/2023/05/04/the-speed-safety-camera-bill-ab-645-faces-its-next-hurdle-what-you-can-do-now/.

The bill would establish a pilot program in six cities. The City of Sacramento is not part of the pilot program (I think because the city did not request that it be), but the pilot results will be critical to implementing the program statewide. There are a tremendous number of privacy protections built into the program, far beyond those required for other motor vehicle code violations, but at least it stands to move forward in this legislative session.

Law enforcement has in the past opposed this legislation because it reduces the number of pretextual traffic stops they can make, though these stops often lead to the dead of motorists and even law enforcement officers. They apparently are not opposing this bill, at least not publicly.

Please check it out and support!

cartoon with speed camera and driver

solving traffic violence with: yes, and

Dan AllisonLeave a comment

It is common among many transportation advocates to posit that we can only really solve the traffic violence problem by redesigning roadways to reduce the opportunity for drivers to speed, and many other driver behaviors which endanger walkers, bicyclists, and other drivers (not to mention sign posts, street furniture, and business fronts). It is true that we have designed our roadways to encourage fast driving, and to passing through rather than stopping, which is to say mobility instead of access. All of this is true. Everything from roadway design standards (federal, state and local), traffic law, signing, widening, and removal of street trees, makes roadways more dangerous and less usable by anyone not in a motor vehicle. So, yes, we need to redesign roads.

Yes, and. At the same time, we need to hold drivers accountable. The focus on fixing roads tends to ignore the contribution of reckless (sociopathic and psychopathic) driving to traffic violence. Every decision to go faster than is safe, to fail to yield to walkers, to pass a bicyclist too close, to use your motor vehicle to intimidate others, to disrupt people’s lives with intentionally loud exhaust and sound, to make unnecessary trips, is a decision. It could be decided otherwise.

I acknowledge that the trend towards blaming roadways, and the engineers who designed them, is a reaction to law enforcement using traffic law as an excuse for pretext stops, where the intent is not traffic safety but the identification and oppression of people of color and the poor. That is demonstrably true, for anyone who reads the research data on traffic stops, or for anyone out on the street paying attention, for that matter. So I am absolutely not advocating for traditional law enforcement, and in fact think that law enforcement has no place in Vision Zero efforts.

But there are other ways of holding drivers accountable. Automated traffic signal enforcement is already in place, though at far too few locations. Automated speed enforcement could be in place if CHP and other law enforcement agencies stopped killing it at every legislative session, with complicity of our windshield perspective governor. Automated enforcement of failure to yield to pedestrians is more complicated, but achievable. I continue to believe that it is a small though very significant portion of drivers who most egregiously violate the law, and kill the most people. If we can control those people, then we can eliminate much death and destruction. Not all, but most.

But how do we control those people? In my experience, most of those people are high income, entitled people, driving expensive cars and SUVs. They are often the people that others consider leaders in business and government. These are not people whose behavior will be controlled by a traffic ticket. We must up our game on them. First, base fines for violation of traffic law on the value of the vehicle being driven. That has the advantage of removing the valid concern about the effect of enforcement on lower income people. Second, impound the vehicle after a certain number of tickets. Third, confiscate the vehicle, sell it off, and use the proceeds to improve roadway safety.

So, after three rants about drivers (red-light-running bullies, Yield to walkers? Nah., and this one), I’ll go back to roadway design. Yes, that is where the ultimate solution lies.

Yield to walkers? Nah.

Dan Allison1 Comment

This is essentially the second part of my red-light-running bullies post. Except that it applies to every intersection, not just signalized intersections.

This is another driver behavior that accelerated with the pandemic. But it didn’t start there. It primarily started with the election of Donald Trump. There was a noticeable change in driver behavior immediately after the election. Many drivers apparently thought, well if the president can say and do whatever he wants without consequence, so can I. It was really noticeable to me how belligerent drivers became. I’m guessing that it was because many drivers see people walking and bicycling as ‘other’, people with different values and political views. Used to be communists, then it was “lib’rels”, and I won’t use the current round of words here. If you are walking or bicycling, you are ‘other’ and if you are walking or bicycling and black or poor, you are truly the enemy. God meant us to drive, and anyone who thinks otherwise or gets in my way is against both God and me. That may sound outlandish, but it does accurately reflect how many drivers view the world.

But back to the driver behavior. Most drivers no longer yield to people using crosswalks. Of course most drivers are not aware that there is a crosswalk at every intersection, whether marked or not. And the DMV is complicit in this, they make no effort to educate drivers about pedestrian right-of-way. The law doesn’t require a driver to stop until the walker steps off the curb (or ramp) and into the street. Common decency would mandate yielding to waiting walkers, but common decency is not common among drivers. Once the walker has stepped into the street, they have the right of way. But most drivers will not stop. They may change lanes to avoid the blood splat on their car, but they won’t stop.

There are drivers who do stop, but when I look at them, I see the fear in their eyes, that they are going to get rear ended by an inattentive driver, or that on a street with more than one lane in the same direction, another driver in another lane will fail to stop or even slow, and they will have to see someone die right in front of their eyes. I understand that fear, because both these things happen with disturbing frequency.

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