NYC Is Decriminalizing Jaywalking In The Name Of ‘Equity’

It’s not every day that you accidentally stumble upon a vast conspiracy among the nation’s various local police departments — especially when it’s a conspiracy that relates to the upcoming presidential election. But yesterday, as I was watching some reporting about New York City’s decision to decriminalize jaywalking, that’s exactly what I did.

In case you missed it, yes, New York’s city council just voted to decriminalize jaywalking. No one’s going to get any more tickets for crossing against the light, or for walking in the middle of the street. Technically, jaywalkers still don’t have the right of way, so I guess they might have some liability if they cause an accident. But realistically, it’s open season for jaywalking in the city. The mayor, Eric Adams, didn’t take any official action on this bill to decriminalize jaywalking — probably because he’s busy with the Biden administration’s attempts to throw him in prison — so the bill has now automatically become law.

Here’s a report on the new law from a local news station. And as you listen to this, pay close attention to what the male anchor says in the beginning:

That’s an interesting little hypothetical. The Democrat politician asks: “When was the last time you said, ‘I’m happy they caught that jaywalker?'” And then the reporter says “Never.” Therefore, we’re meant to conclude we don’t need the law against jaywalking.

First of all, if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to drive a vehicle in New York, then the answer to this question would be a resounding “Yes.” You would scream with joy if the police arrested every single pedestrian who was walking in the road, even if they were there legally. Pedestrians make driving about a million times slower and more annoying in New York. Drivers in New York wouldn’t shed a single tear if it became a capital offense to jaywalk.

But even if we pretend that’s not true, it’s a pretty interesting argument that these women are advancing, if you think about it. They’re saying that, if you’ve never stopped yourself and said, “I’m happy they caught that guy for violating law X,” then we don’t need law X anymore.

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It’s arguably not a bad way of looking at things, but coming from Democrats in New York, it’s a pretty entertaining approach. Imagine these people applying this principle to, say, New York’s business records law — the one they accused Trump of violating. Prior to Trump, has anyone in the history of New York ever found themselves saying that they’re really glad that someone was held accountable for victimless, misdemeanor record keeping violations that happened 7 years ago? Obviously the answer to that question is no. So why do we have those laws on the books? It would be fun to watch that politician (and the reporter) answer that particular question.

It would also be entertaining to ask these women whether we should get rid of, say, the entire tax code while we’re at it. After all, I don’t see anyone celebrating IRS agents who audit people for not reporting $600 they just received on Venmo. So why don’t we decriminalize every single accounting offense and tax code violation? Those aren’t rhetorical questions. It’d be a great idea. But of course, these questions never occur to Democrats in New York. They’re enforcing “equity,” not logic.

In any event, back to my conspiracy. You may have noticed how the anchor (and the politician) explained the reasoning for this new law. But let’s focus on the anchor for now, because he actually seems pretty skeptical of the law. As the anchor put it, “The overwhelming majority of jaywalking tickets were given to minorities. So why didn’t they just level the playing field on these tickets?”

In other words, the anchor wants to know why the police didn’t simply ticket more white people for jaywalking, while ticketing fewer blacks and Hispanics. Wouldn’t that solve the whole problem? If we did that, then instead of 90% of jaywalking tickets going to black people and Hispanics, we could make it closer to, say, 40%. And then racial equity will be achieved.

This is the kind of question you only ask when you’ve been subjected to decades of lies about crime statistics by Democrats like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama, to the point that you actually believe them. It’s a question that makes a very significant assumption that happens to have no basis in reality. And that assumption is that members of every racial group are jaywalking at precisely the same rates.

If you truly believe that assumption is true, then there is indeed a vast conspiracy among thousands of local police departments, all over the country. There’s no other explanation for what’s going on. That’s because, as I’ve discovered, these so-called “racial disparities” in jaywalking enforcement happen to exist everywhere — not just in New York.

Here’s a report from San Diego from a couple of years ago, for example. For some reason, they interviewed a guy who had a beef over his jaywalking ticket. And then they get into the statistics, which reveal just how deep the rot goes in the San Diego police department. Watch:

So, 16% of the tickets went to blacks, even though they make up only 6% of the population. And this is “proof,” according to the activist, that the police are racist. There can’t be any other explanation for that data. And she doesn’t stop there: “Black people are disproportionately affected by almost every type of decriminalization.”

Well, that gives you some sense of just how widespread the conspiracy is. Across every type of crime, across the entire country, the police are enforcing laws in a racist manner. It can’t possibly be that different demographic groups are committing different rates of crime. That’s just unthinkable. Instead, you’re commanded to think that any difference in crime statistics must be due to one thing and one thing only, which is racist cops.

A few weeks ago, I talked about how the DOJ used this “reasoning” during the Obama administration to sue various police departments for enforcing the law. One of the cities they went after was Ferguson, Missouri — which also happens to have an issue with “disproportionate” jaywalking tickets. That’s how vast this conspiracy of racist traffic cops is. Watch:

The data just keeps coming in. If you’re keeping track, from New York to San Diego to Ferguson, racist traffic cops are “targeting” black Americans for jaywalking. In fact these racist cops are so brazen that they’ll often target these black Americans *on video*. That’s what happened in Jacksonville a few years ago. This is a video from Vox that tries really, really hard to present a police officer as racist for doing his job and enforcing the law. Watch:

From this clip, we can conclude that even when there’s video of a cop enforcing the law in a calm and impartial way — and even when everyone concedes that these people were jaywalking — we’re told it’s still racist because of those statistics. It doesn’t matter if black people are on video jaywalking, basically. It’s illegal to ticket them for it because then you’ll have a “disparate impact.”

It’s hard to overstate how widespread this moral panic has become. Over the past few years, especially at the height of BLM, there were national news stories about supposedly “racist” jaywalking arrests. Here’s one of them in Tulsa:

The lawyer’s not even arguing his client is innocent, really. He’s implying that the optics are bad for the police because they should know that it’s racist to enforce jaywalking laws against black people. 

This incident made national news. There was a legal battle that stretched on for years. Apparently the police eventually paid a $20,000 settlement over it. And they did nothing wrong. When people are in the middle of the road, you can grab them and arrest them. You can even put them on the ground when they’re not responding. That’s how the law should work. But in cities like New York, it’s not the law anymore.

This is a battle the Left has waged for a very long time. Last year, the Left-wing outlet Mother Jones published an article entitled, “The Case for Legalizing Jaywalking.” It makes all the predictable “disparate impact” arguments, where they assume that any statistical disparity is somehow proof of racism.

And then there’s this paragraph, which is a real doozy:

The notion that pedestrians should be relegated to sidewalks and allowed to cross the street only when a walk sign tells them it’s safe is a relatively new phenomenon. … Groups ranging from the Chicago Motor Club and the Automobile Club of Southern California to the National Safety Council and the Boy Scouts began using the word ‘jaywalker’ in the late 1910s and early 1920s to insult pedestrians who had the audacity to enter the roadway outside of intersections. … Los Angeles passed the first anti-jaywalking ordinance in 1925, which became a model for other cities across the country. Discrimination soon followed.

Yes, according to Mother Jones, the idea that you shouldn’t walk in the middle of the street is a “relatively new phenomenon” that only began in the late 1910s and early 1920s. It’s possible — and I’m just spitballing here — that one reason for this change might be that cars themselves are a relatively new phenomenon that only became popular in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Maybe that’s why the idea of jaywalking came about “relatively recently,” as in, a century ago. This is like saying air sickness is a relatively new phenomenon that only began after people started flying in airplanes. It kind of goes without saying.

MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ NOW STREAMING ON DAILYWIRE+

But this is the level of “argument” you get when “equity” is the objective. You have to act surprised that we didn’t have jaywalking laws before we had cars. You’re reduced to inventing vast conspiracies to explain inconvenient data. In essence, you have to make yourself as dumb as Kamala Harris — all in the service of a delusional and counterfactual ideology.

In this particular case, the consequences couldn’t be any more obvious. You can visit any third-world country to see what it’s like when cars and pedestrians share the road equally. It’s total chaos. I’m not usually one to defend government regulation, but our roads are clearly safer and more orderly because of the laws and regulations in place. New York City is getting rid of a common-sense law that obviously makes the roads safer for everyone.

And they’re doing it because of the same guiding principle that the Biden-Harris administration outlined in a day-one executive order, which is to pursue “equity” in all aspects of government. We’ve talked a lot about the specific policy ramifications of electing someone like Kamala Harris, but this is another consequence that’s worth talking about. Presidents don’t just set policy. They also set a tone and a broader agenda. They set an example for people to follow all over the country.

A Kamala Harris administration would encourage and incentivize many more laws like the one that just passed in New York. A second Trump administration, on the other hand, would send a very clear signal that people are tired of lawlessness. It would mean that we can finally put an end to the fiction that every police department in the country is conspiring to “target” any particular racial group. It would be a rebuke of the policies of “racial equity” that have gotten so many people killed, across every demographic. That’s a rebuke that, for people living in New York, may come too late. But for the rest of us, it can’t come soon enough.