You crossed. Take your camera and point it across there at the red hand. That is a crosswalk.
That's a 65 dollar ticket a piece. Get into my car.
We just crossed the street, we just crossed the street without following the sign. That was it.
And we got stopped.
The young man in this video's name is Devonte Shipman.
And he was stopped right here in Jacksonville, Florida.
And threatened with jail time for essentially, jaywalking.
You did do something illegal. You crossed the crosswalk.
Yeah, I crossed the crosswalk.
Against a red hand. I was sitting right there when you did it.
I wasn't paying no attention that's - you act like I really just committed a serious crime that's worth this time right now.
It is worth the time. Walk to my car.
It's not often we report on jaywalking. It's a minor infraction.
We've even seen cops do it.
Shipman would later say one of the officers told him he was just stopping him
to make sure he didn't have any guns, knives, or drugs on him.
They even questioned why his friend was wearing a hoodie.
Then I'm gonna look more suspicious.
That's up to you.
No. Apparently you don't even have free will anymore.
Damn this crazy. N***a can't even walk across the street. I guess cuz a n***a black, can't do nothing.
I guess like I look like I'm doing something wrong.
Shipman's story isn't unique. And it led us to question, exactly how many people here
in Jacksonville have experienced walking while black.
Listen to me. I am doing you a favor.
I'm not telling you again.
What's your name?
Devonte Shipman.
Alright so there's another infraction.
Not only was Shipman given a 62 dollar ticket for failing to obey a pedestrian signal,
he was also cited for walking without an ID.
Which harkens back to troubling racist laws.
And to be clear it's actually a citation that's meant for motorists.
but the cop tried to give that ticket the Shipman anyway.
That charge was eventually dropped.
The video struck a chord with thousands of people
who shared it, and here in Jacksonville many people can relate to Shipman's story.
Why would you stop two black men crossing that intersection? I was shocked
because it's like I didn't really think people actually get ticketed for things
like this. You know what I mean like especially not in that area you got
people that cross that intersection day and night, like continuously, so I'm trying to
figure out like why was at this cop at this moment stopping us.
In Florida there are 28 laws pedestrians must observe while walking.
They include everything from jaywalking to walking on the wrong side of the road to failing to
cross the road at a right angle or the shortest route.
Yes, that's a thing.
We wanted to see how poverty and race factored into who's getting these
tickets so we requested data from the state. Here's what we found.
In the last five years, Duval County police officers handed out 2,208 pedestrian citations.
The most given citation in Duval County was for failing to cross in a crosswalk
between adjacent intersections with traffic lights.
But here's the thing,
We examined those 658 citations and found that 54% of them
were not given in locations with adjacent traffic lights.
They were legally permitted to cross, yet they still received a ticket.
If you're living in the county's three poorest ZIP codes, you're 5.9 times more likely to receive a
pedestrian ticket than anyone else in Jacksonville.
That's the highest percentage in Florida among large counties.
With high-profile incidents of black men encountering police all across the country,
Shipman decided to film his.
You got people getting shot by police, you got people getting abused, it's just brutality that's just non-stop.
So I just felt like I just needed to record it to prevent a situation.
Getting stopped for jaywalking can feel so absurd that on more than one occasion,
a person has called the cops on the cops.
Jacksonville 9-1-1. What's going on there?
Um, something is going on like a mile down the street. And I parked my
18-wheeler, in the parking lot like a half a mile and I'm trying to tell the
officer that I park right there. He don't want to hear nothing I gotta say.
That's John Kendrick, a Jacksonville truck driver. He was trying to park his
18-wheeler in his leased parking spot when a police officer wouldn't let him
pass through. Stunned, he moved his vehicle to the median and called 911.
The dispatcher told him to get the officer's car number, but when he stepped off the sidewalk,
the officer ordered him to the ground, handcuffed him, and ticketed him for a pedestrian violation.
But I was in the crosswalk at the time and he still
locked me up, kept me in the squad car for about four hours, five hours, on the spot.
The guy kept saying that you're not gonna have no job tomorrow, you're not
gonna have no job tomorrow.
Kendrick received one of 387 tickets issued to people for walking in the roadway where sidewalks are provided.
78 percent of those tickets went to black people.
They just cruel. And they be cruel to black people. I just hate to say it like that but they be cruel, real cruel.
They think that we won't fight, and that's what the problem is.
They know that that we're scared, that some people are scared to go to court.
You know me, I I turned out, I hired a lawyer, we fought and got the charges dropped.
We spoke to the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office and they aren't
concerned about disparities. They believe the numbers simply reflect who's
breaking the law. They also said they're enforcing the law to keep people safe.
If their citation efforts result in just one less pedestrian death, they say it's a win..
One report ranked Jacksonville the fourth worst city in the country for pedestrian safety.
But does giving pedestrian tickets actually help make walking safer?
It's probably not a good use of resources to be ticketing people
and having education and enforcement programs in place
to regulate behavior that just isn't feasible, and isn't possible because of
the physical environment.
That's Andy Clark, who was hired by the city ofJacksonville to consult on pedestrian safety.
After a year, Clark issued a master plan and wrote that no amount of enforcement will
change behavior in this area. He concluded that the city should invest in
better infrastructure before it writes tickets.
The reality is, the physical environment, the infrastructure for walking and cycling, is quite poor.
And there aren't sidewalks, there's a disconnected bikeway network,
There are very few crosswalks, there's high-speed roads that have very few
opportunities to cross. I mean it seems unfortunate to say the least and
capricious at worst to be ticketing people for behavior that just is
impossible to do the right thing or be in the right place.
The master plan found that Jacksonville was simply behind the curve on pedestrian safety.
The city hadn't map which roads had sidewalks and put bus stops on streets that didn't have them.
Experts agree that writing more pedestrian citations
won't reduce the number of accidents.
And the data shows, the people getting the tickets are mostly black, more likely to be poor,
and they're walking in a city that just wasn't built for pedestrians.