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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

CA doesn’t prosecute major crimes like burglary, shoplifting or drug possession. How many people have gotten ticketed for jaywalking beyond the rare exception?

I jaywalk all the time, even in front of cops and nothing happened.

This is like legalizing pot in CA. It’s just updating the law to reflect enforcement.

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That's because jaywalking is frequently, if not always, used as a pretext to stop and investigate someone for purposes of harassments or profiling.

Do you dress well, and generally look like a law abiding citizen? I'll bet you never get stopped.

If you wrapped yourself in blankets and started pushing a shopping cart in an affluent area, you would learn all about laws that you had no idea existed.

>frequently, if not always

When you're making sweeping generalizations and arguing in near absolutes, citations are very much needed.

Check out the statistics farther down this page from the campaign that pushed for the law change.

https://www.calbike.org/freedom-to-walk-campaign/

Black people are 4.3x more likely to be stopped and ticketed for jaywalking than the white population as a whole in San Diego, and 3x - 3.7x more likely to be stopped in LA (depending on where).

These discrepancies, and use of the jaywalking rules as a targeting mechanism, were one of the very reasons for the change in law that this thread is discussing.

I see nothing about rates of jaywalking tickets, just racial comparisons (done quite crudely as well).

How many actual jaywalking citations are given? That would be a good place to start?

You’re right. I misspoke. Black people are only 400% more likely to be stopped than whites for jaywalking. Ticketing is not mentioned.

Wouldn’t that statistic still support my assertion that jaywalking is used as a pretext to harass certain populations?

That’s a very different problem. The law not being applied fairly is fixable.

That is a good thesis statement. Go ahead and finish the essay.

You can get a ticket, of course. But it's also Yet Another Pretense to do a search and (for example) find drugs on you or whatever.

"Well don't have drugs on you and you'll be fine" what is the point of search warrants then? Jaywalking is not the only thing like this, but it's among a list of many things that police can use as a green light to do a reasonless search for... well, based on their gut feeling that they are looking at A Bad Guy.

There is perhaps a deeper argument about maybe not saying that doing a minor infractions should allow police to search you for other crimes, but absent that at least getting rid of pretexts for people to just automatically lose their rights for behavior most people are doing on a daily basis seems like a good idea.

You can’t be searched (beyond a pat down for weapons) when given a jaywalking citation.

A pat down for weapons _is_ a search!

They can do a pat down during ANY encounter. You don’t need a citation to do it.

You’re dancing around one of the issues here, and that’s selective enforcement. When laws like this remain on the books, they can be used to target specific areas or segments of the population. That’s one reason that it’s being removed.

> CA doesn’t prosecute major crimes like burglary, shoplifting or drug possession.

One of those is not like the others...

Huh? Jaywalking is not a felony, it's a traffic violation. You'd get a ticket. There is no criminal trial. This is like saying CA doesn't fine people for speeding.

Jaywalking laws are probably enforced whenever they're convenient to enforce, i.e. against undesirables.

In my city, a few thousand per year (although the latest stats I can find only go up to 2020)

Downtown Los Angeles sometimes goes of sprees of jaywalking enforcement, but only in downtown. Never saw it enforced anywhere else in the city.

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