Brian Doherty discusses how citations for petty crimes, like Los Angeles’ renewed push to strictly enforce jaywalking laws, disproportionally target the poor:
[A]n earlier wave of jaywalking enforcement in Los Angeles began back in 2006, under the aegis of the “Safe Cities Initiative.”L.A. police had already been issuing over a thousand tickets per month for jaywalking in the name of homeless management. A 2007 study from UCLA law professor emeritus Gary Blasi, “Policing Our Way Out of Homelessness? The First Year of the Safer Cities Initiative on Skid Row,” found such jaywalking or other petty citations given at rates 48 to 69 times those in the rest of the city. It noted that “of the 1,000 people per month who receive citations and are unable to pay the fines, most will face subsequent arrest and jail, even though the original offense may have been littering or a pedestrian signal.”
Balko focuses on how cities use these petty citations to make money at the expense of their residents’ wellbeing:
I’ve written quite a bit about how cities have come to use traffic cameras not to maximize public safety, but to bolster city revenues. It’s gotten to the point where several cities have been caught shortening yellow lights to hand out more tickets, a practice that makes intersections significantly more dangerous. … Arguments against policies like primary seatbelt laws, jaywalking enforcement, traffic cameras, “distracted drivers” laws, and arbitrary speed enforcement are often met with derision. But these laws inevitably become more about revenue generation than public safety, and when local and state governments start to see motorists and pedestrians as piggy banks, you get policies like those above. For a good percentage of the population these fines can be devastating, and for them, there’s nothing petty about the aggressive enforcement of petty crimes.
The Dish 