Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams in recent months has repeatedly defended his department’s enforcement of pedestrian violations. Claims of a racial disparity have been overstated, he has argued. There is no policy targeting people of color, he has insisted. He’s made his case before the City Council. Most recently, Williams had a report supporting his claims hand-delivered to a local NAACP official.
When making his case, Williams has relied on what he has said is a true accounting of pedestrian ticket data for recent years. That data, he claims, shows that 45 percent of tickets went to blacks. That figure, while greater than the city’s black population, is substantially less than the number reported by the Times-Union and ProPublica in a series of articles late last year. The Times-Union and ProPublica reported that 55 percent of the tickets over the prior five years had been issued to blacks.
This week the Times-Union and ProPublica obtained the sheriff’s data, and the numbers are misleading.
Williams, it turns out, has included in his count tickets written for “soliciting,” which typically means panhandling. It is a criminal charge for which people are routinely arrested. It is not covered by one of the more than two dozen civil statutes under which people are ticketed for pedestrian violations — jaywalking, for instance, or walking on the wrong side of the road.
The vast majority of the roughly 800 soliciting charges were issued to whites, often people seeking money or food at the entrances to freeways and other locations. It is unclear why so many went to white people, but the sheriff’s decision to include them in his presentations on pedestrian ticketing accounts for his claim that only 45 percent of all pedestrian tickets in recent years were issued to blacks.
That infraction was not included in the ProPublica and Times-Union analysis because it is not a jaywalking citation. Its exclusion was made clear to the sheriff in a series of findings letters, starting in August. ProPublica and the Times-Union published all the citations it included in its analysis in a methodology article in November.
Ken Stokes, chairman of the Jacksonville NAACP’s Legal Redress committee, was hand-delivered the sheriff’s data recently. Stokes said he was told the numbers represented the totality of pedestrian enforcement. The inclusion of the soliciting tickets in the data was not explained to him, Stokes said.
“The main issue is trust,” said Stokes, who called for a halt to the pedestrian ticket writing in the wake of the reporting by the Times-Union and ProPublica. “The black community doesn’t trust the police department. And when you keep this kind of stuff circulating, that hurts your credibility.”
The Times-Union and ProPublica asked the sheriff’s office about the data he was using in his public presentations. In response, the office issued a three-paragraph statement defending the count and its enforcement actions.
“All of these laws are in place to protect pedestrians,” the statement said. “We do not selectively exclude certain ones from our analysis.”
There were other inaccuracies.
At a public forum on implicit bias last month, Williams stood on stage and told people that his organization has made contact with 11,000 people who violated pedestrian laws in recent years, and only given 15 percent of them tickets
Those numbers are incorrect.
The 11,000 number Williams was speaking about actually includes pedestrians, motorists and bicyclists. It also spoke only to periodic grant-fueled education campaigns emphasizing warnings over citations. It does not represent day-to-day policing in Jacksonville.
Reporters provided the Sheriff’s Office with a direct quote of Williams’ inaccurate statement made at the forum, but the agency’s response did not directly address it. Instead, its statement offered that officers have made contact with “11,000 violators of laws designed to protect pedestrians, as well as other non-motorists.”
Last year, the Times-Union and ProPublica documented the often serious implications for people receiving the $65 pedestrian tickets. Credit ratings were damaged when people could not pay. In hundreds of cases, people lost their driver’s licenses when they were unable or unwilling to pay.
