The New York City Council voted to rename streets after hip-hop artists Christopher Wallace (aka the Notorious BIG) and the Wu-Tang Clan and folk musician/activist Woodie Guthrie. If Mayor Bill de Blasio gives his final approval, a block in Brooklyn where Notorious B.I.G. was raised will be called Christopher Wallace Way, Staten Island will have a Wu-Tang Clan District, and part of Coney Island's Mermaid Avenue will be renamed Woody Guthrie Way to celebrate his 1940s home. From Rolling Stone:

Cultural advocate LeRoy McCarthy spearheaded the efforts to rename the streets after the legendary hip-hop acts. “I’m happy that NYC officials are finally giving the city’s indigenous ‘Hip Hop’ music the respect and recognition that it deserves. It took a long time and lots of hard work to advance the Christopher Wallace Way & Wu-Tang Clan District street co-naming, but ya know what, Hip Hop Don’t Stop,” McCarthy told Gothamist.

Additionally, Woody Guthrie Way located at Coney Island’s Mermaid Avenue between West 35th and West 36th marks the section of Brooklyn where the folk legend lived in the early 1940s.

Read the rest

Jaywalking shouldn't be a crime. Everyone does it; it's part of the self-governing behavior of urbandwellers, and is so routine that I've suspected it plays a crucial role in a city's everyday mobility. Countries that don't criminalize jaywalking have lower rates of people killed in traffic.

Even the police in many US cities would seem to agree that jaywalking laws are silly, because they ignore a ton of jaywalking.

The exception? Black Americans -- they're dramatically more likely to be charged with jaywalking than white folks. What's worse, several jaywalking arrests of black residents in recent years have spiraled into abuse, violence and even death -- as with Trayvon Martin, or the case that recently came to light of Johnnie Jermaine Rush: after Rush jogged away from two officers who stopped him for jaywalking, they strangled, punched and tasered him.

This, as Matt Ford argues in this excellent piece in the New Republic, is yet more evidence that jaywalking laws need to go. They're selectively enforced in a racist pattern:

Jaywalking is a trivial crime, one that virtually every person has committed multiple times in their life. This makes it susceptible to arbitrary enforcement. Sacramento’s black residents are five times more likely to receive a jaywalking citation than their non-black neighbors. Seattle police handed out 28 percent of jaywalking citations from 2010 to 2016 to black pedestrians, who only make up 7 percent of the city’s population. [snip]

Eliminating jaywalking and similar offenses won’t lead to anarchy on American roads.