Last week, the Los Angeles City Council voted to have more illegal guns on the streets, more unsafe drivers on the road, and more dangerous criminals running free with no way for the police to apprehend them. And the vote was 13-0.
All in the name….of equity!
With the vote, the council authorized a study that aims to limit how often motorists are pulled over for low level traffic infractions and shift the responsibility of enforcement from uniformed police officers to unarmed city workers.
In particular, the council wants to throw the brakes on “pretextual” traffic stops during which someone suspected of a crime is pulled over for breaking a less serious traffic law. According to NBC 4, many of these pretextual stops have been used to recover illegal guns around the city.
The stated goal of the council is to reduce the number of people – specifically brown and black men – thrown into the court system for breaking the law. You can’t send someone away for possessing an illegal gun, having an outstanding warrant, or kidnapping a child, for example, if you just don’t know about it. See how that works?
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson told NBC4, “I know the amount of people that they catch – burglars and many other things through traffic stops…That doesn’t make it a just or rational policy.”
Fun fact: On April 19, 1995, some 90 minutes after the Oklahoma City bombing, 80 miles north of the crime scene, an Oklahoma State Trooper pulled over a Mercury Marquis with a missing license plate. The driver’s name was Timothy McVeigh.
But, I digress.
It should be noted that all of this is happening when the roads in Los Angeles have never been more dangerous.
According to Los Angeles Police Department data printed in the Los Angeles Times, traffic deaths reached a record high last year with 336 people killed in crashes citywide — up from 312 in 2022 — more than the number who died in homicides. That’s the highest number since the city started keeping statistics over 20 years ago. More than half of those killed, 179, were pedestrians. Serious injury incidents have also spiked in recent years.
It’s also in the wake of the state legalizing jaywalking.
In January of last year, I wrote about the stupidity of the “Freedom to Walk” bill, authored by San Francisco Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting and signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom.
Ting said the bill was necessary…out of racial equity!
According to his office, Black Californians are up to 4.5 times more likely to be stopped for jaywalking than those who are white.
In a statement, Ting said, “It should not be a criminal offense to safely cross the street…When expensive tickets and unnecessary confrontations with police impact only certain communities, it’s time to reconsider how we use our law enforcement resources and whether our jaywalking laws really do protect pedestrians. Plus, we should be encouraging people to get out of their cars and walk for health and environmental reasons.”
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Here is what I predicted in the pages of this paper at the time:
“This change in the law will almost certainly lead to more pedestrian deaths.
According to California’s Office of Traffic Safety, pedestrian deaths account for just over a quarter of all state traffic fatalities.
Agency data from 2020 shows that across the country, 6,516 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes, up nearly 4 percent from the year prior.
For the record, jaywalking laws aren’t a holdover from the Jim Crow South. As a matter of fact, they were enacted in California in the 1920s to protect pedestrians, because they were being killed by cars in great numbers.
Now, in the name of ‘equity’ we want to turn California roadways into one big game of Frogger.”
Turns out, I was more right than I thought I was.
Now, in the name of equity, we are making it open season on pedestrians.
These people are crackpots and this insanity will not stop until Angelinos start voting differently.
John Phillips can be heard weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on “The John Phillips Show” on KABC/AM 790.