Shabazz Stuart on Safety, Enforcement, and Justice in Cities

The excellent War on Cars podcast had a discussion in their last episode that touches on the issue of enforcement and traffic safety, something I've been pondering lately. The crew talks to Shabazz Stuart about streets and policing in New York City.

Stuart's comments helped clarify this difficult issue for me, and got to the heart of the key questions around enforcement and representation.

Here's a rough transcript, from about 15:00 into the episode.

Question from Doug Gordon:  Particularly since VZ initiatives start popping up, advocates for VZ have often talked about enforcement to make streets safer. And there's been a lot of pushback on that, saying "hey calling for more enforcement to make streets safer does not necessarily make streets safer for black and brown people. and the bike advocacy movement does tend to be a white and male movement. There's been some writing saying you can't actually have a movement for safe streets until you deal with racism. 

Shabazz Stuart: There's a lot to unpack in this conversation. I think it's a conversation that's long overdue in our community. Look, we cannot be afraid of the term enforcement, and I'm afraid we're heading in this direction where all enforcement is bad. 

Enforcement is a necessary mechanism in an ecosystem of a society that functions with law. If you have laws, your laws need to be supported by enforcement at some point, otherwise why bother having laws? We risk being naive if we think we can have a fully functional legal system without some form of enforcement. So when we talk again about abolishing police departments, we are talking about completely rebuilding what our enforcement mechanisms look like. And the question is not to abolish the notion of enforcement, the question is to fix the notion of enforcement. 

... Right now, I don't know if we can narrow down [the larger conversation about police] to traffic enforcement. In the short term, we can be mindful as advocates that enforcement as it is today is inherently problematic. We have to be mindful that simply saying "we need more enforcement" is not going to be a silver bullet or panacea that solves our problems. We have to account for the problematic nature of enforcement on our streets in our policies. We have to say, if we enforce bike lanes, why are black and brown people more likely to get stopped for running a red light? 

It doesn't mean that we say "no more enforcement." So we include black and brown voices in our conversation, in a manner that is humanizing and acknowledging of their diverse experiences, than we can expect to resolve some of these challenges by virtue of having these people, this constituency, at the table with us as we discuss these issues.  

Listen to the whole conversation for more.