SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KRON) — Jaywalking is a crime that many of us were guilty of committing at one time or another.
One California lawmaker said jaywalking is arbitrarily enforced by police, and pedestrians cited for it are usually minorities.
In an effort to seek fairness and prevent potentially escalating police stops for jaywalking, State Assemblyman Phil Ting, (D-San Francisco), introduced a proposal to change the way pedestrians can be cited for crossing a street outside of an intersection.
AB 2147, The Freedom To Walk Act, would decriminalize jaywalking when a roadway is safe to cross.
“Whether it’s someone’s life or the hundreds of dollars in fines, the cost is too much for a relatively minor infraction. It’s time to reconsider how we use our law enforcement resources and whether our jaywalking laws really do protect pedestrians,” Ting said.
The law aims to prevent police officers from using jaywalking as a pretext for stopping and detaining minorities.
“Everyone jaywalks, but California police officers are five times more likely to stop a Black person for jaywalking than a White person. These laws are not only discriminatory, but also lead to harmful — and, in some cases, deadly — encounters with police,” said Rio Scharf of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
There are some extreme examples in the Bay Area when jaywalking stops have gone wrong.
In Millbrae, Chinedu Okobi was killed in 2018 after San Mateo County deputies approached him for jaywalking and he refused to stop walking.
Dashboard video footage of the encounter showed Okobi walking on a sidewalk along El Camino Real. He jaywalked to avoid a deputy and the deputy called for backup.
When deputies surrounded the unarmed 36-year-old Black man, the confrontation quickly escalated. Deputies ordered Okobi to lay face down on the road. When he refused, deputies used Tasers, batons and pepper spray.
Video shows a frightened and confused Okobi asking, “What did I do?” during the scuffle with deputies.
Okobi shouted, “Get ‘em off me! Somebody help me!” after deputies shocked him multiple times with Tasers. An autopsy concluded that Okobi died from cardiac arrest.
“My brother, Chinedu Okobi, was electrocuted to death,” Ebele Okobi wrote in a Facebook post.
Between 2018-2020, data compiled by the California Racial and Identity Profiling Act shows Black Californians are severely overrepresented when it comes to being stopped for jaywalking, up to four-and-a-half times more than White pedestrians.
AB 2147 is Ting’s second attempt to decriminalizing jaywalking in California. His latest proposal makes technical changes to address the concerns stated in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s veto message of AB 1238 last year.
Instead of repealing the state’s jaywalking laws, the new bill defines when an officer can stop a pedestrian for jaywalking — specified as only when a reasonably careful person would realize there’s an immediate danger of a collision.
Jaywalking laws were enacted in the 1930s by the emerging auto industry, which saw the number of deadly car accidents skyrocket in the prior decade. Blame was shifted from drivers to pedestrians, Ting said.
AB 2147 is scheduled for its first committee hearing this spring.