Should Jaywalking be a Crime?

The jaywalking stop that went out of control has made the national news with video of a Seattle police officer punching a girl.

But that raises the question – should jaywalking be illegal in the first place?

Dan Savage of The Stranger says no, citing David Owen’s book Green Metropolis (emphasis his):

In Manhattan, creative jaywalking is an environmental positive, because it makes traveling on foot easier: it enables pedestrians to maintain their forward progress when traffic lights are against them, and to gain small navigational advantages by weaving between cars on clogged side streets—and it also keeps drivers on their guard, forcing them to slow down…. Tightly controlling pedestrians with a view to improving the flow of car traffic just results in more and faster driving, and that makes life even harder and more dangerous for people on foot or on bikes.

In fact, studies have shown that pedestrians are safer in urban areas where jaywalking is common than they are in urban areas where it is forbidden.

His post has received 150 comments with many different viewpoints.

Some people feel that jaywalking is a safety issue:

Jaywalking might seem insignificant in a city with serious crime issues, but police and the nearby high school say it’s a dangerous epidemic. John Navel graduated from nearby Franklin High the year before and said many people don’t see anything wrong with running across a busy road. “They don’t think it’s a big deal that’s why they were saying ‘you just hit her over jaywalking.” Navel believes the officer acted appropriately when he used force to gain control of the situation and he supports the officer going out there to look for jaywalkers.

The police say they also get complaints from businesses and even drivers. Barbara Hayes passes through on her way to and from work every day. She doesn’t think it happens too frequently but is glad the officers are trying to stop it. “I saw an incident the other night, the guy was lucky he didn’t get killed – it was only because there was a smart driver there.”

However, it appears that jaywalking stops often turn confrontational:

Auditors who oversee complaints against Seattle police officers have repeatedly expressed concerns about jaywalking stops and minor street confrontations that escalate into physical altercations, and they say better training is needed.

At least four auditor reports since 2004 — the most recent last year — have flagged the issue, which is receiving renewed attention in the wake of Monday’s videotaped jaywalking stop in which an officer punched a 17-year-old girl after she shoved him.

The history of jaywalking is an interesting one. As linked to from this blog, The Toronto Star reviews the history of jaywalking. Here’s more good insight into how walking across the street has become criminalized as “jaywalking”:

The cleverest anti-jaywalking publicity effort was in Detroit in 1922, where the Packard Motor Car Company exploited the new fashion for monuments to traffic fatalities. Packard built an oversized imitation tombstone that closely resembled the monument to the innocent child victims of accidents in Baltimore. But Packard’s tombstone redirected blame to the victims. It was marked ‘Erected to the Memory of Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped from the Curb Without Looking.’

What preceded the invention of jaywalking? A 1926 report notes “a Common Law principle which developed centuries ago… This ancient rule is that all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way.” (Miller McClintock for the Chicago Association of Commerce, “Report and Recommendations of the Metropolitan Street Traffic Survey,” p. 133, quoted by Norton on p. 289.)

So, should we go back to those idyllic days when roadway users had equal rights? It’s doubtful that would go over well with the motorists of the world. Considering how cities have been built for cars over the last several decades, a drastic change is unlikely. But, at the very least, it may be worth reconsidering how “jaywalking” is prosecuted.