The Sheriff did not say walking while black is still a crime, at least not in those words.
However, the policies and practices of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office scream those words every day.
They scream those words despite being rebuked by a Times-Union/ProPublica Investigation, “Walking While Black “ That investigation analyzed 5 years of pedestrian tickets, from 2012-2016. Initially the emphasis was on pedestrian safety as JSO claims safety is the main purpose of the tickets. What was discovered was that the tickets were written disproportionately to blacks and nearly all of them were written in the city’s poorest communities.
Blacks were three times as likely as whites to be ticketed. Residents of the city’s three poorest zip codes were six times as likely to be ticked as those in more affluent zip codes.
When a wealthy white woman power walks down the middle of the street in the Beauclerc, or Ortega Neighborhoods, with a perfectly good sidewalk she chooses to ignore, JSO calls that, recreation.
When a poor young black man walks on the side of the road in the Phoenix or East jacksonville neighborhoods, with a crumbling, uneven sidewalk, he has twice before fallen face first into, JSO calls that a Pedestrian violation.
When whites do it, recreation.
When blacks do it, violation.
Truth be told, the way the statute is written both should receive citations. But many of the 28 statutes currently on the books regarding when and where you can legally walk are open to interpretation by the officer, as well as “selective enforcement.”
In Duval County the target of that selective enforcement is black males, 14-35.
Personally, if it were me and I had the choice of citing one or the other, the young man with the sidewalk in disrepair would be getting a pass, and maybe a please be careful, while the power walker refusing to use a sidewalk in perfect condition would be getting the citation.
Unfortunately that is not what was exposed by the Times-Union/ProPublica investigation.
Some of the more glaring findings were; Seventy-eight percent of all tickets written for ” walking in the roadway where sidewalks are provided” were issued to blacks.
As well, blacks accounted for 68 percent of all recipients of tickets issued for ” failing to cross the road at a right angle or shortest route.”
To put those percentages in proper perspective, blacks make up 29% of Jacksonville’s population.
And the big issue; the sheriff’s office had and continues to issue hundreds of erroneous tickets for crossing the street while not in a crosswalk. The mistakes appear to have originally resulted from a misunderstanding of the statute on the part of the sheriff’s officers. The often misapplied crosswalk statute accounted for more tickets than any other, and again, blacks were over-represented in that category of ticket.
The statute only applies to those crossing between adjacent intersections with traffic signals.
Which means; if you are not crossing the street between two traffic signals, even if you are not in a crosswalk, you are not breaking the law. You are however, still required to yield to oncoming traffic, as that traffic is only required to yield to you within the crosswalk.
It seems JSO most often misinterprets that law and writes tickets in error when the pedestrian is black.
Some people call that racial profiling. Law enforcement calls it the Broken Windows theory of policing. The approach emphasizes enforcement of low-level “quality of life” ordinances as a way to limit public disorder and, as a consequence, deter the kinds of more serious crimes that can flourish in neglected communities.
One of many problems with Broken Windows theory is that those communities also have no sidewalks, and or poorly maintained sidewalks.
As established, these pedestrian citations usually have less to do with safety and more to do with giving an officer the opportunity to stop someone they find suspicious, to question them, and or to search them, with the ticket giving them probable cause.
When Sheriff Williams was first called out on this matter by the press, the Public Defender’s Office, Jacksonville City Council, and local activists, he fired back with his own numbers that still showed a majority of blacks had received the citations, but not as staggering as the disparity uncovered by the Times-Union/ProPublica Investigation.
Many of those involved laughed at Williams’ “figures”. Then the Sheriff pretty much ignored the issue and would immediately change the subject when the issue was brought up as he had an election to win.
Now just a little over two months since he was sworn in for his second term, his officers are once again out in the poorest of our neighborhoods, practicing Broken Windows theory law enforcement and writing those Walking while black tickets.
Meanwhile, over in Beauclerc and Ortega, and any of the other dozen or so wealthiest communities in Jax, white women are practicing “recreation” in the street while pristine sidewalks go unused.
And what does the Florida State’s Attorney’s Office think about all those erroneous pedestrian citations being written, along with Jacksonville’s own version of “stop and frisk”?
Mac Heavener, chief assistant state attorney, said the question of whether large numbers of tickets had been issued in error was a ” novel issue” for his office. He said it would be up to defense lawyers to question the validity of the ticket, and any subsequent arrest that occurred as a result of the pedestrian violation.
Heavener has since been promoted to the United States Attorney’s Office.
According to Heavener; you can pay the ticket, or you can pay to fight the ticket. Whichever you choose you’re going to pay, and those in our black community are going to pay the most.
