I live in California, which is bad enough, despite some efforts to make things walkable/wheelchair accessible. I’m always shocked at how bad so many states are.
And it’s not just about using road to divide populations from each other - something that’s been done almost everywhere - it’s generally another weapon to be deployed against certain populations. I’ve seen a number of videos of cops targeting/harassing/arresting black people for walking “in the streets” in their own residential neighborhood… that had no sidewalks.
he got double-whammied.
if he’d been in a car, he’d have just been another faceless car. it’s cold so windows would be up, and night so no light to see inside. even in daylight there’s usually too much glare to see through windows reliably. the walking part is what got him noticed. walking=poor and or homeless to people who live in suburbia, which is where most wal marts are. which means you’re going to rob someone or set up camp. to be black on top of that turns those fears up to eleven.
as a white guy who’s been walking in areas where nobody walks, or at odd hours, or both, I can assure you that any police passing by will fuck with you.
just another charming side effect of car culture.
Yep. I used to do late night walks through a pretty heavily forested park near my house.
I like seeing owls hunt.
And about 10% of the time, coming out at the trailhead a pig turns his spotlight on me and yells at me through the PA: STAND STILL WHERE ARE YOU GOING. COME HERE. STAND STILL. I SAID COME HERE. I SAID STAND STILL. WHY ARE YOU LOOKING AROUND. DON’T MOVE SO SUDDENLY! STAND STILL. COME HERE. DON’T MOVE.
Cops love to manufacture crises. I’m lucky that I’m white, and I’m glad the pigs never decided to shoot me after working themselves into a lather.
Try to hit Joshua Tree NP, the owls will entertain you for days. We’ve a mother/off spring roosting on our land, they really can clean up your varmint issues.
In this video, even the female sounding cop didn’t like to be ignored, or have her ‘orders’ be not followed. That’s what I always see with cops, is that they want to have all sorts of reverence and respect placed at their jackboots.
My other comment is that this was a real-world example of the entry into the school to prison pipeline. Even mundane stuff will snare BIPOCs. Now I’m sure that the cops now have his mugshot, fingerprints and being in Texas, probably his DNA. Wonder if there’s a way to get all those data deleted if he wasn’t convicted of, or even charged with, a crime.
For anyone looking for additional reading on related topics I would recommend Right of Way by Angie Schmitt. It’s primarily a look at the growing rate of pedestrian deaths in the US, but framed through the lens of structural failures that put non-white and low income communities at higher risk. https://islandpress.org/books/right-way
I don’t drive, so I have some sense of how the cops react to a white pedestrian in a lot of car centric areas. I would probably have been stopped, but immediately released on the first statement that I am fine and will continue walking on my own. The systems around pedestrian control are every bit as entwined with race and class as any other part of policing.
Just finished doing 5 years of stats for South LA. There are some anomolies and gaps, and interestingly “historic south central” is not part of the South LA bureau (rather, it’s part of Newton Division which overlaps the 10 Freeway) so I was asked for now to exclude that.
57,000 collisions. 3,661 involve pedestrians. Of 351 total fatalities, 199 are pedestrians and 26 bicyclists. I don’t recall a code for motorcyclists but I would bet that the majority of the remaining 126 fatalities involved other vulnerable road users.
DUI collisions: 448. DUI Fatalities: 12.
If we could muster the same power as MADD for the other causes of death, many lives might be saved. Change should arguably start with the biggest problem within our car-centric city - the total lack of personal accountability while driving. Of the 57,000 collisions, 31,000 were hit and runs.
