citymaus

“Traffic stops are by far the most common reason that police officers initiate contact with members of the public; they account for 84% of encounters, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In fact, before cars, ordinary citizens rarely came in contact with law enforcement. As we rebuilt cities around the automobile, historians contend, drivers came to expect to be policed. And communities of color have paid the highest price. 

In Berkeley, Black drivers are six times as likely to be stopped as white drivers, and four times as likely to be searched. Stops for minor infractions––a broken taillight, speeding––are also more likely to turn deadly for Black and brown drivers, as the deaths of Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, and Daunte Wright illustrated.

All this enforcement isn’t making our streets safe: Despite growing police budgets, the United States has the highest number of traffic deaths per capita of all developed nations.

Darrell Owens––along with a coalition of racial-justice advocates, anti-car activists, and traffic-court public defenders––wants to change that. Designing better streets, they say, won’t just prevent traffic accidents. It will reduce the need for police enforcement, and its potential for violence, altogether. 

Just a few weeks earlier, Owens had watched George Floyd being murdered in an intersection and had joined in the protests. The Berkeley City Council had since promised police reform. But Owens, who, at 6 foot 6, is known by one city-council member as the “youngest, tallest, and only Black” regular attendee of transportation-commission meetings, had been stewing on a more specific idea. His Twitter thread laid out his argument for transforming law enforcement by transforming city streets: “I prefer license plate cameras … and mailed tickets over: ‘ok make sure nobody does anything that justifies this cop pumping 4 rounds of lead into me.’” 

To his surprise, the City responded. A councilmember retweeted his thread. A month later, the City Council passed “BerkDOT,” a first-in-the-nation measure to shift traffic enforcement to unarmed Department of Transportation workers. 

In the summer of 2020, cities across America made similar commitments: to curtail the use of force, shrink police budgets, and fund fleets of civilian officers. But Berkeley was the first to target the traffic cop. By doing so, it is rethinking police power at its root. 

a speed feedback sign in stockholm that enters complaint drivers into a lottery. 

“In 1925’s Carroll v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the police could search automobiles—unlike homes and offices––without a warrant. This Prohibition-era “vehicle exception,” passed to counter an uptick in alcohol smuggling, gouged a hole in citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights. Suddenly, law enforcement had unprecedented entry into our private lives––all an officer needed was a missing license plate or a broken taillight.

Thus was born the pretextual stop.

Police enforce the law. But they can’t fix the street-level issues that cause people to break it. In 2020, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency examined the effects of speeding enforcement on driver behavior and found that once a visible officer leaves the scene, speeding violations recommence.

Narrow the road, protect bike lanes, and add medians, and drivers will slow down.”

read more: theatlantic, 15.10.21. 

“A New York Times investigation last fall revealed that in the previous five years, police officers pulling over drivers had killed more than 400 drivers who were neither wielding a gun or knife nor under pursuit for a violent crime—a rate of more than one a week. Police culture and court precedents significantly overstated the danger to officers, encouraging aggression in the name of self-defense and impunity from prosecutors and juries, the investigation found. 

Legislation limiting pretextual traffic stops in Pittsburgh quoted The Times’s reporting, and advocates across the country have cited it to argue for the changes. The killings at traffic stops are among a total of about 1,000 a year by American police, data shows.

The Rev. Ricky Burgess, the councilman who sponsored Pittsburgh’s legislation, said the risk of escalation created by disproportionately stopping Black drivers—exacerbated by pre-existing tensions between the police and Black residents—was a greater threat to public safety than the traffic violations.

“For a Black person, the stop itself becomes the dangerous moment,” he said. 

philando castile was killed in 2016 by a police officer at a traffic stop for a broken brake light. 

“Although unions in Philadelphia and Los Angeles oppose limiting the stops, police chiefs in those cities and elsewhere have embraced the idea. In 2013, Harold Medlock, the now-retired police chief of Fayetteville, N.C., told his officers to quit stopping cars for expired registrations or equipment violations to focus on speeding, reckless driving and other more dangerous infractions.

In 2016, the year he retired, the Fayetteville police made more than 50% more stops than in the year before he took over—and mainly for those hazardous infractions. But although the police were stopping more cars, they searched far fewer Black drivers or passengers—a third of the number they had searched in 2012, according to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation.

The same data showed that traffic fatalities, the police use of force and citizen complaints about the police all declined during that time—while predictions of an explosion in gun and drug crimes never came to pass.

“Everything good that could happen, did happen,” recalled Mr. Medlock, the former chief.

In Seattle, Chief Adrian Z. Diaz said the demands for more equitable policing after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 had coincided with staffing challenges from the pandemic. Dangerous driving surged on empty streets while the number of officers available for duty fell sharply. In response, the city this year began using cameras to police red-light violations and other infractions at some intersections, and Chief Diaz ordered officers to quit stopping cars for a list of low-level traffic infractions that he deemed a waste of their time. 

“We would prefer to get back to the basics of, you know, fighting crime,” Chief Diaz added.”

read more: nytimes, 15.04.2022.

reactions in minneapollis and new york after mr. chauvin was found guilty of murdering george floyd.

more photos: nytimes, 20.04.2021. 

red canary song’s statement on the atlanta spa shootings.

red canary song is a a grassroots collective of asian & migrant sex workers, organizing transnationally. if you can, please donate. 

read more: “anti-asian violence is consistently directed at women.” gq, 18.03.21. “killing people because of ‘sex addiction’ isn’t a thing.” vice, 18.03.2021. “how racism and sexism intertwine to torment asian-american women.” nytimes, 18.03.21.

arrested mobility — exploring the impacts of over-policing BIPOC mobility in the us. @TRB (transportation research board) session, 25.01.2021.

“arrested mobility”: black people are historically and presently denied the inalienable right to move, to be moved, or to simply exist in public space by legal and illegal authority, resulting in adverse social, political, economic, and health outcomes that are preventable, widespread, and intergenerational. 

“Some of the early southern American police forces were born out of slave patrols. In other parts of the country, groups of men were hired to protect the property of the wealthy. After the Civil War during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs maintained a similar function to the slave patrols through their enforcement of segregation and disenfranchisement of previously enslaved Africans. Enforcement started out and continues to predominantly be about protecting wealthy and white comfort at the expense of the lives of Black and Brown folks.

The invention of the automobile represented a new threat to public safety, with the first US automobile fatality taking place as early as 1899. Regulations were needed to prevent reckless driving, and police began enforcing speed limits and other safety laws. 

“Policing the roads was always about more than just public safety. It was about the exercise of various types of power: local power, racial power, and making money.” —Cotton Seiler, author of Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America.

The over-reliance on police for traffic enforcement in the US has a serious impact on freedom of mobility for Black and Brown people. 

In the modern era, researchers at Stanford University analyzed data from close to 100 million traffic stops between 2011 and 2017 and found Black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and have their car searched than white drivers, which the researchers stated was evidence of systemic racial profiling. Latinos, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islander Americans are also disproportionately stopped while driving, which in many cases can lead to arrest and deportation. According to the US Burea vu of Justice, the traffic stop is the most common interaction between US residents and police officers. It is understandable that members of these these communities may feel distrust and uncertainty when interacting with law enforcement.

the chicago tribune, 17.03.17 reported that the police department was writing exponentially more bike tickets in black neighborhoods than majority-white ones.

“Oboi Reed form the mobility justice nonprofit Equiticity said that when he first started organizing community bike rides in predominantly Black and Brown lower-income neighborhoods, he heard from young people that they didn’t ride their bikes because they felt they were being targeted by the police. That was a new concept to him at the time, but he took their word for it. He added that when he shared the youths’ concerns with mainstream transportation advocates and Chicago Department of Transportation officials, often the response was disbelief—people didn’t believe the police were actually guilty of profiling cyclists of color. But years later the Tribune data proved that officers were, in fact, writing exponentially more bike tickets in communities of color, and a police spokesperson eventually admitted that this was due to bike enforcement being used a pretext to conduct searches in high-crime areas.

“The vast majority [of the contact] that BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] folks have with the police is in the act of exercising our human right to mobility….The vehicles of mobility are our sidewalks, trains, buses, and vehicles that are a major part of our cities. That’s where the collision happens.”

That’s a harmful situation because people require mobility for improved educational opportunities, job opportunities, opportunities to improve their health, etc. “When our mobility is restricted, any number of life outcomes become constricted. The nature of policing in [Chicago] is to constrict our movement.” He referenced slave patrols as “the foundation of policing.”

“I always think about mobility justice literally being the intersection and the arteries of every social justice movement,” Río Oxas said. “It’s how we get to school, work, the clinic, our friends, the mountains, the ocean. That’s mobility justice.””

read more: chi.streetsblog, 14.12.2020.

SPUR’s 2020 san francisco and california voter guide.

yes on prop K! 

“Even at a young age, LeRonne Armstrong understood the officers’ actions as an affront to his family’s dignity. “Just to see the manner in which they searched left me in a position where I felt like, man, that’s just messed up,” he said. “Those experiences have a tremendous impact on you growing up and how you view police. It makes you dislike them.”

Armstrong’s distrust was reinforced by his mother, who was wearily accustomed to corrupt policing. She told him, “We don’t talk to the police. We don’t expect the police to do anything for us besides take us to jail or potentially kill us.”

West Oakland at the time was an increasingly dangerous place. “It’s got so that people have been afraid to go out of their houses,” a local Baptist pastor told the New York Times in 1984. And yet, Black residents often viewed the police as a force that terrorized the community it was intended to serve.

Armstrong is now being considered for the role of Oakland’s next chief of police. If appointed, he would oversee one of the most controversy-ridden departments in the country.

“Nationally, police killings have consistently hovered around 1,100 a year since 2013, according to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence – a number that dwarfs other wealthy countries. Although African Americans make up just over 13% of the general population, they account for a disproportionate number of shooting victims and are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Police have killed at least one Black man or woman every week in 2020.

According to a recent analysis by the ACLU, Black men face about a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by the police over the course of their lives. The report states: “Stunningly, for young men of color, police use of force is now among the leading causes of death.”

Officers of color, especially those who are Black, have at times been met with accusations of selling out their community. During episodes of confrontation between the community and the force, such as this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, Black officers have to straddle a line of loyalty – Black or blue.

Black officers experience what WEB Du Bois once described as “double consciousness”, a state of seeing oneself through the eyes of other people. “It’s really a feedback loop, which is on one hand [Black officers’] experiences with other police officers and then on the other hand, their experiences with community members.” Sociologist Rashawn Ray of the Brookings Institution suggests that some may feel like impostors for “not really fitting in in either space”.

read more: 22.10.2020. 

“In what will be among the largest and boldest urban police reform experiment in decades San Francisco is creating and preparing to deploy teams of professionals from the fire and health departments—not police—to respond to most calls for people in a psychiatric, behavioral or substance abuse crisis.

Instead of police, these types of crisis calls will mostly be handled by new unarmed mobile teams comprised of paramedics, mental health professionals and peer support counselors starting next month.

"It's glaringly obvious we need to change the model," says San Francisco Fire Dept. Capt. Simon Pang, who is leading the fire department's effort to build these new street crisis response teams.

“The city's new mobile teams are modeled loosely on a program in Eugene, Oregon called Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS). CAHOOTS has successfully diverted these kinds of behavioral and mental crisis calls away from police for more than three decades.

While Denver, and Portland, Ore., have launched similar efforts they remain small pilot reform programs in select sections of those cities. San Francisco's effort is set to be the largest urban effort of its kind to date.

“Removing police from most nonviolent psychiatric and behavioral crisis calls is no small shift: they can account for a quarter or more of all police calls for service. If you add in 911 calls for issues or complaints surrounding homelessness, the numbers shoot even higher, police data show.

Moreover, surveys show that nearly a quarter of fatal police encounters followed calls about "disruptive behavior" directly tied to a person's mental illness and/or substance abuse disorder. Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics surveys show that 64% of those in jail and more than half of all prison inmates have a mental health problem, many of them undiagnosed. 

These mobile teams will include a specially trained psychologist or social worker, a fire department paramedic and a peer support expert, ideally someone with lived experience in recovery from alcohol or drug abuse and perhaps homelessness.

San Francisco's new, unarmed, non-police teams are scheduled, at first, to take over the police calls for code 800 – a broad, catch-all category the police describe as a "report of a mentally disturbed person." The police here got nearly 17,000 of those code 800s last year, according to SFPD data, and nearly 22,000 overall from persons in mental or behavioral crisis. The vast majority of them were non-violent. Of those code 800 calls, the police data show, only 132 of them reported "a potential for violence or a weapon."”

read more: npr, 19.10.2020. 

“A Grand Jury in [whichever state this is happening in this time] acquitted police officer [Northern European last name] for the death of [Person of Color], who was killed while they were doing [thing people do on a daily basis] at [place most people wouldn’t expect to get killed at]. Police were in the process of carrying out [form of unconstitutional search and seizure] when the officer began [action wildly inappropriate for the situation], resulting in [Person of Color]’s death.

During a press conference, state Attorney General [person many are calling a “rising star”] explained that, because [Person of Color] reacted to police officers by [action any reasonable human being would take when being hounded by a large group of men pointing weapons and yelling at them], the use of force by Officer [Northern European last name] was justified. The attorney general then cited [defensive argument used during the Nuremberg trials] as precedent, reminding constituents not to give in to [emotion people with a moral compass experience] and instead trust in the system outlined in the state’s [document written back when people still peed and pooped into a bucket and flung the contents out of a window].

“Shortly after the announcement, protestors began marching peacefully outside [civic building named after a slaveholder], until a small group of protestors began [mild expression of discontent], and police officers responded with [paramilitary tactic you’d expect to find in an active war zone].

Along with the recent killing of [different Person of Color] in [state with a town named “Springfield”], the death of [Person of Color] has become a major cultural touchstone that has reignited the nationwide movement to end systemic racism and police brutality that started [number that is appallingly high] years ago.”

read more: mcsweeny’s, 24.09.2020. related: “fired officer is indicted in breonna taylor case; protesters wanted stronger charges.” nytimes, 23.09.2020. 

protesters chant the names of individuals killed by police, spurred by the memory of breonna taylor and bay area residents killed by police. frank ogawa / oscar grant plaza, oakland, 24.09.2020. 

breonna taylor. louisville, ky. 23.09.2020. 

“What bike violation is so severe that they needed to stop Dijon Kizzee?” Congresswoman Karen Bass tweeted on Tuesday. “What bike violation is so severe that they needed to chase him? What bike violation is so severe that they needed to shoot him as many times as they did? If he dropped a weapon, why was he then shot?”

Kizzee had been riding a bicycle in violation of vehicle codes, an LASD (Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department) lieutenant said in a press conference on Monday. When deputies tried to pull him over, he allegedly dropped the bike and ran. After a physical confrontation in which he allegedly punched an officer in the face, Kizzee dropped a bundle of clothes that he’d been carrying. Upon seeing a handgun in the pile, the deputies opened fire, LASD said. Kizzee was pronounced dead at the scene.

“In a phone call on Tuesday, an LASD press officer did not provide additional information about which vehicle codes Kizzee allegedly broke, and said that investigators had not released his name. Kizzee’s family identified him at the scene, and has retained civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who tweeted on Tuesday that “cops shot him in the back 20+ times then left him for hours.” 

“Numerous studies have shown that such traffic stops disproportionately target Black and Latino people and other people of color, leading to higher rates of such fatal outcomes. Among several transportation experts, the fact that Kizzee’s fatal encounter with the LASD began on a bicycle serves as a painful example of how racism can be built into city streets. In part, that stems from laws that prioritize the safety of driving over that of walking and biking, while simultaneously over-policing pedestrians and cyclists, said Gregory Shill, a law professor at the University of Iowa. “This equilibrium punishes people—mostly people of color and the poor—who rely on walking and biking to get around,” he said. “Combined with armed law enforcement, these laws are a recipe for tragedy.” 

read more: citylab, 01.09.2020.  and: “dijon kizzee was ‘trying to find his way’ before LA deputies killed him, relatives say.” latimes, 04.09.2020. 

“Many people wanted to believe this time was different. Many people wanted to believe we reached a tipping point. I have had countless Black colleagues exclaim that FINALLY, white people had seen what it is to be Black in this country.

Did they? Did it matter?

I’m not sure white people really saw it. I know many saw a video. But they didn’t see the pain, sorrow, and the agony we had before, during and after the video—even Black people like me who refused to watch. I don’t need to see a video to believe that pain. I certainly don’t need a video to feel it. My pain lasts longer than the 8 minutes and 46 seconds it took to extinguish George Floyd’s last breath. My pain has more endurance than it requires to run 2.23 miles in support of Ahmaud Arbery. My pain spans longer than the 162 days since Breonna Taylor’s killers murdered her as she slept. 

I am not sure that seeing a video, any video, matters to non-Black folks. In fact, I’m sure my life doesn’t matter more to them than before they watched. I am honestly too exhausted to tell you why or how I know. Plus, I don’t have the energy to dig up the data from some academic journal to prove it, just my lived experience. We already know who won’t believe it: those who never believe what Black people tell them because they themselves don’t experience it.

I am exhausted because being Black is hard. No. I’m exhausted because white people make being Black hard because of their own insecurities and fears. Not just at my job, not just in my relationships, not just in this country, and certainly not just as a concept in my mind. Literally everywhere. I can’t escape the fact that while the color of my skin makes me breathlessly beautiful, it also makes others want to take my last breath. It makes others afraid, makes me a target, makes having just one bad day or making one bad decision impossible, and makes it impossible to ever believe that simply reforming something built to destroy me will save me.

“It is hard for people who are not Black to truly understand the trauma we carry. It does not just go away. Non-Black people don’t believe it if they can’t see it. They stand by and cheer us on and lament that they wish they could do more, but then don’t. We are in a world where our lives and our trauma and our pain is real. It’s valid. It matters.

Why don’t I get to be safe? Why doesn’t my black son get to be safe? Why don’t I get to sit on Twitter all day sending out fun memes, commenting on threads about things that don’t matter, and pretending that saying I care about something is enough even if I don’t do anything?

“What should non-Black folks (you?) do now? Do what you would do if your life and existence were at stake.

Don’t do it performatively. Do it intentionally. Do it with purpose.”

read more: tamikabutler, 27.08.2020.  photo: los angeles, flickr/sterlingscott

“Several weeks ago, a friend and I were verbally harassed and almost physically attacked by a white supremacist on a hike in Berkeley. While yelling a hideous assortment of racial epithets, a man lunged at us several times and threatened to smash our heads in with the wooden board he was carrying. Luckily, we escaped unscathed—or so I thought.

I let “nigger” roll off my back as it was not the first time I encountered such vitriolic disdain for my existence. And I knew it would not be the last. But, I did not realize that I would wrestle with the weight of this hate and aggression for weeks to come. And it worked, as trauma does, masterfully disguised. I couldn’t place the tightening I felt in my chest any time someone was approaching my direction. Nor could I understand the sudden urge to grab pepper spray before an essential run to the grocery store. 

Taking transit while Black. Hiking while Black. Jogging while Black. 

black lives matter march in portland, 04.06.2020. flickr/matthewalmonroth

“We exist in a painful reality where it took almost three months for Ahmaud Arbery’s killers to be arrested after his slaying while jogging down a street in Georgia. As cities nationwide move towards limiting vehicle traffic to facilitate socially-distant recreation or travel on “open” streets, I’ve been overwhelmed with a lingering anxiety of just being in public space.

The practice of open streets has sparked an intense dialogue among community activists, scholars, urbanists, and transportation professionals alike. A battle of ideologies has ensued — bringing to light an inability to hold and acknowledge the gravity of multiple truths against the weight of each other.

You can want open streets and want to hold cities accountable to ensuring new policies do not further harm communities of color. You can want open streets and want to prioritize the acute needs of Black and Brown communities that have been forced to show up for themselves in the midst of a crisis that has impacted them severely. Realizing these ideals in tandem may demand greater imagination and the decentralization of personal desires, but they do not necessitate competition. And yet, I’ve repeatedly observed them held in contempt of one another, particularly in the name of closing streets to vehicle traffic. 

I understand that equity is inconvenient. It demands reckoning with the ways in which we are complacent in upholding institutions of dereliction and oppression. Those of us who serve Black and Brown neighborhoods often grapple with the complexity of wanting to increase the availability of sustainable mobility options and hold space for the trauma that transportation and city planning have inflicted on our communities. The mental and emotional toll of walking this tightrope of internal tension can be profound. But we walk it, steadfastly.

We walk it because we understand that transportation mobility and access can make the difference between poverty and economic stability. We walk it because of the disparate impacts of climate change on our communities. We walk it because we know that fears of displacement due to bicycle infrastructure is not a retired narrative. We walk it because of the societal and cultural importance cars have held in our history. We walk it because of our own love of active transportation. We walk it because we have experienced the pain of being targeted while traveling for no other reason than the color of our skin. We walk it because the ability to hold multiple, oftentimes complex, truths is a prerequisite for enabling a just existence. 

42nd street “slow street” in oakland. flickr/sirgious

“This reflection is not a critique of open or slow streets programs. This reflection is a call for more critical nuanced thinking within our profession—especially in the time of the COVID-19 crisis. This virus is exacerbating existing inequities as rapidly as it’s spreading. As seen on a national level, nuanced decision-making (or a lack thereof) can be the difference between life and death.

When transportation professionals, particularly Black women, sought to call nuance into the conversation and policies around open streets and equity, responses ranged from the standard “not yet, not right now” to the dangerously insidious “Black/Brown people are more likely to die from traffic fatalities.”

alice street, oakland. flickr/sirgious

“Those who stand to be the most impacted by a policy or program should hold the most power in the decision-making space, but they rarely do. Thus, inquiries into how new transportation policies might compound inequity and erasure are always critical questions. They invite necessary nuance into an already delicate conversation. They are questions that someone must call attention to. For inattention is what allows inequity to flourish.

The most striking assertion is the falsity that, because we do not passively accept transportation policies and projects as they are presented to us, we don’t want Black and Brown communities to have access to active transportation infrastructure. How dare we ask for an evaluation on the impacts of decisions that were made for us, without us at the table—right?”

read more: attheintersections, 13.05.2020. 

protestors rallying in philadelphia, 06.06.2020. flickr/joepiette

“First, we must consider the legacy of “placemaking” — and what the word “place” truly means for Black Americans.

Everywhere we look, urbanist practices and our built environment itself continue to be place-based manifestations of racist ideology and the institutions of slavery.

a home owners’ loan corporation map of chicago. “redlined” areas were “undesirable” because “colored” people lived there. redlining increased segregation and decreased housing equity for black people. read more: chicagomag, 22.08.17. and see: mapping inequality.

“While many call for the arrest of the officers that murdered Breonna Taylor, I am calling for the arrest of every system, structure, and policy that engendered her death—starting with urbanism.

Here are just some of the ways that the fields of urban planning, transportation planning, architecture, and civil engineering can meet this moment and answer the call for collective design-centric reparations in the built environment. 

oakland community land trust 

I suggest the above structural solutions for one reason: because I am not willing to wait for a personal transformation to happen in the hearts and minds of every American, and I can’t commit my life to convincing people that I am worthy of decency and retribution. 

a mural dedicated to breonna taylor. flickr/mtumesoul

“Reparations and structural change are necessary, non-negotiable next steps for every industry. Breonna Taylor should be alive and her neighborhood should not have to grapple with literal displacement while mourning her death. While our elected officials convene research boards and advisory councils, cities, agencies, and organizations can act — and begin a process of true atonement today.”

read more by dr. destiny thomas: streetsblog, 27.07.2020.

oakland solidarity march with portland against federal military occupation, 25.07.2020. 

read more: sfchronicle, 26.07.2020.