Death by car or the criminalization of walking
July 21, 2011 - 6:17pm
When design kills: the criminalization of walking
Bad design kills people.
That's right. It's not a matter of aesthetics, or of politics, or of opinion. It's a plain fact: When you design streets solely for cars, people die as a result. The underlying conditions that are responsible for those deaths are rarely or never challenged. The victims often get blamed for their own injuries or deaths.
Don't believe me? Well, let me refresh your memory about Raquel Nelson, the Atlanta-area mother who was recently convicted of vehicular homicide, second degree -- but not for anything she did behind the wheel. No, she was crossing a busy road with three children when her 4-year-old son was struck by a car and killed.
USA! USA! How many kids did you kill today?!
Nelson, 30 and African-American, was convicted on the charge this week by six jurors who were not her peers: All were middle-class whites, and none had ever taken a bus in metro Atlanta. In other words, none had ever been in Nelson's shoes:
They had never taken two buses to go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart with three kids in tow. They had never missed a transfer on the way home that caused them to wait a full hour-and-a-half with tired and hungry kids for the next bus. They had never been let off at a bus stop on a five-lane speedway, with their apartment in sight across the road, and been asked to drag those three little ones an additional half-mile-plus down the road to the nearest traffic signal and back in order to get home at last.
And they had never lost control of an over-eager four-year-old as they waited on a three-foot median for a car to pass. Nor had they watched helplessly as a driver who had had "three or four" beers and two painkillers barreled toward their child.
Tremendous article on a horrible story. How can six jurors find this woman guilty of anything, peers or otherwise?
Surely some group will fund and launch an appeal on Nelson's behalf! What an incredible and horrific outcome to a tragic event.
Especially when her conviction is contrasted with letting the impaired (alcohol, pain killers and vision) hit and run driver off on the same charge.
Vaughan 'speechless' at crossing guard cuts
Vaughan pointed out Ford was staunchly against a council decision last week to place a traffic light outside a school on Dufferin St. between Dundas St. W. and Peel Ave.
“Now he wants to get rid of the crossing guard that helps get the kid across the street,” Vaughan said.
Vaughan 'speechless' at crossing guard cuts
Vaughan pointed out Ford was staunchly against a council decision last week to place a traffic light outside a school on Dufferin St. between Dundas St. W. and Peel Ave.
“Now he wants to get rid of the crossing guard that helps get the kid across the street,” Vaughan said.
I wonder how many of Toronto's tax dollars were spent on the soulless amoral consultants hired to save tax dollars.
Governments at all levels are addicted to high-priced consultants. While the war on unionized public employees is raging, the gravy continues to flow unimpeded to all types of consultants. The right wingers want to have it both ways. On the one hand, they "deplore" the E-Health fiasco where unaccountable consultants did not deliver. On the other hand, they attack unionized employees making less than 30% of what a consultant makes. Contrary to the new mantra, not all work can (or should) be done for minimum wage with no benefits.
According to NOW Magazine, it was $350,000.
http://www.nowtoronto.com/daily/news/story.cfm?content=181712
Looks like it's not the public sector workers who are riding the gravy train.
Georgia mom Raquel Nelson was spared prison today in the sentencing phase of the jaywalking conviction she faced after her son was killed in a hit-and-run.
Nelson could have ended up spending more time in jail than the man who ran over her four-year-old son and sped off after a jury convicted her of jaywalking.
Jezebels, Welfare Queens—And Now, Criminally Bad Black Moms“This hit and run story is such an apt metaphor for what’s happening,” said Nikki Jones, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “American policies have essentially been a hit and run on black women that leave them in circumstances where they’re managing day to day and then getting punished for their very victimhood.”...
“It’s a hard time to be a poor black mother,” Jones said. “Structurally, the support systems for them have been severely eroded and there are just more ways to punish people for being bad parents than there were in the past, because the criminal justice system is more punitive.”
In the last 20 years, women of color have become the fastest growing segment of the prison population, driven in large part by new classes of crimes that have been created or relabeled, said University of Hawaii criminologist Meda Chesney-Lind. Where 20 years ago crimes like the sale and possession of tiny amounts of drugs, or drug use during pregnancy, were not even considered crimes, today they are fueling a massive uptick in incarceration rates. The addition of mandatory minimum prison sentencing over the years eliminated judges’ discretion and contributed to these racially disparate increases. And Nelson’s story illustrates another mechanism of the criminal justice system where racial biases can go unchecked: District attorneys commonly are publicly elected officials, and so glom onto cases that grab headlines and spark the ire of their voting base.
“The child welfare and criminal justice systems both are punitive institutions that target poor black women for punishment for harms to their children that are really caused by social inequality,” said Dorothy Roberts, a legal scholar on race, gender and child welfare policy at Northwestern University.
The animus toward poor black mothers in particular, Roberts said, is part of a long historical tradition of stereotypes that focus on their supposed twin evils: hyper-sexuality and inadequate motherhood.