Funny enough, my daughter’s bike helmet was something that the police gave out for free. We went to the Lavender Festival in Sequim, WA and the local Sheriff’s office were giving them away to promote bike safety.
(Not the Seattle PD though, Sequim is a good 2+ hours’ drive from Seattle.)
cite?
I don’t think Seattle has been trying to fix its police problem, but the federal government has been. This has been ongoing since 2012.
THAT is awesome. You’ve got my vote for benevolent dictator.
As a bike commuter, I’m used to being INfuckinVISIBLE. Every driver I see is distracted and/or watching out for other cars, not bikes. If I assume NO ONE can see me, I get in fewer scrapes (I’ve gotten hit a couple of times, but I’ve bounced!)
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ps I’ve seen cops using jaywalking laws against kids who are skateboarding legally, or that are just carrying their skateboards.
OT - how can they have a lavender festival in the same town where this is how people react when you paint your garage that color?
I can’t remember where I saw it but a few days ago I read online one city was going to do the same for its jaywalking laws because it was only being used against the homeless
In small towns, little problems have big significance.
I don’t agree. I managed to have that idyllic 2-wheeled childhood in the ‘90s while wearing a helmet. I lived in a suburb that was affordable then and isn’t anymore; my parents’ house is worth a cool million last I checked. There were a lot of families with kids my age then, and the streets were and still are good to ride on. There was a shopping center a couple miles away and across only one semi-busy street with a grocery store, drugstore, a Taco Bell, a frozen yogurt shop, and a revolving assortment of other shops and restaurants. For a year or two that included a funky bead shop where I made a necklace. I was pretty free to go see my friends, spend my allowance, get sunburned, and get lost, as long as I wore that helmet and came home for dinner. Now I defend parents accused of neglect for letting their kids have that kind of freedom.
I know every generation thinks their childhood was the best of times. Your childhood was probably after they conquered polio, but you still only had three channels to distract you. Your younger cousins think they dodged bullets on both ends by coming of age after the Soviets stopped seeming like such a threat and before AIDS, stranger danger, and the death of rock and roll. But I got to enjoy the era after we stopped blowing literal smoke in our kids’ faces and letting them carelessly splatter their brains on the pavement, and before helicopter parenting, the housing boom, and social media ruined everything, so I’m actually right. 
I would’ve assumed that the guy with the purple house was a UW fan and his neighbor was a WSU fan.
completely different shade of purple, though
It’s entirely fair to be cynical and skeptical about the lack of concrete effort on this issue by local officials. To be clear, I’m not referring to any formal initiatives pursued by Seattle city government, or even by a committed majority of the population; I’m speaking more generally, in the abstract, out of respect for the limitations of the forum. To go further would cross the line into political debate, and I’m trying to be cautious and circumspect.
As an Olympia resident, I tend to consider anyone voluntarily living on the peninsula to be a different shade of sane. 
I didn’t read of any homicides in the article, so I assumed that wasn’t the case.
For the enforcement to be biased, that would mean homeless people are relatively overrepresented in the pool of cited riders, and relatively underrepresented in the pool of helmetless riders. Is there evidence that this is the case?
Having said that, it’s fair to acknowledge that the cost to buy a helmet is a hardship for people with low/no income, and keeping a helmet is pretty challenging if you’re homeless. People love to howl about the financial burden on society for treating head injuries, but it’s not like we’re going bankrupt for it. If you’re serious about cutting the public burden for health care costs, mandate healthy diets, exercise, and sunblock for everyone. Until then, people should mellow out about making riders wear helmets. For one thing, if you take away a helmet mandate, and you won’t lose all the helmets - just some of them.
Here in Philly they are not enforcing vehicle violations for the same reason.
Good idea-treat a symptom but let the disease continue to fester.
This should be done more often.
Whenever you have a dumb law that is widely flouted, but still occasionally enforced, you are basically saying it only (or at least primarily) applies to minorities and poor people. The rich dude cycling down nicely paved trail from your posh neighborhood to the local upscale brew pub, is he gonna get busted for not wearing a helmet? Of course not. The kid cycling on a road past a police car in the poor area of town? You bet he is.
I’m sure parents of minority children would hope that happens as well. I bet that their long experience with cops is that this hope is really just a fantasy. It’s far more likely that the missing helmet won’t be an excuse to educate the child, but an excuse to harass the child, humiliate the child, punish the child, and hopefully catch the child in an actual crime.
I often see claims/headlines like this, but the claim is always vague. There are a couple of interpretations I can think of.
Interpretation #1: Black drivers commit minor traffic violations with the same frequency as white/Latino drivers, but the average Black violator is more likely to get stopped/cited than the average white/Latino violator. Reasons for this may include straight-up racism on the part of the police, or it may be due to greater police presence in high-crime areas where Black people tend to live. A review of the traffic stop record for any given officer could shed light on this: we would hope that the demographics of the people an officer stops in any given area match the demographics of the area itself. However, even if that’s the case, that officer may still be biased if he stops a larger fraction of all the violators he sees while patrolling in a Black neighborhood than when that same officer is patrolling in a white neighborhood.
Interpretation #2: Black drivers actually commit minor traffic violations with greater frequency than white/Latino drivers. If (for the sake of this particular discussion) we assume even-handed enforcement, this could account for the percentage of cited drivers who are black being greater than the percentage of residents in any given area who are black.
Has anyone actually studied this sort of thing to definitively pin down what’s happening? Or do we have nothing but news bylines to go on?
Black drivers get pulled over less often at night:
https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-darkness-reas-traffic-stops/
In NJ, the state police had to come to some agreement with the feds because they were so bad about pulling over more blacks than anyone else. They don’t operate in neighborhoods, good or bad, so it wasn’t due to having more police presence in bad neighborhoods.