Naomi Doerner, Alliance Advocacy & Membership Manager, also contributed to this post.

Feeling safe in our streets isn't solely about infrastructure. Unfortunately, our experience and treatment in public spaces is inextricably linked to our (real or perceived) identity. The presence of a bike lane or a sidewalk is just a single piece of a complex set of built environment factors that shape our mobility choices and constraints.

Over the past year, a long history of troubling police tactics and discriminatory planning practices that have led to financial disinvestment in low-income and communities of color has been thrust into the national spotlight with the tragic deaths of Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, and others. It's been sustained by the powerful mobilization of people  who have risen up to provoke an ongoing conversation on the forces, from policing to education, that shape dramatically different life paths for people living in adjacent zip codes but of different skin tones.

At the same time, the bicycle and pedestrian movement has seen a shift, as well. With the dramatic increase in cities adopting Vision Zero, there's been a direct focus on raising the urgency to save lives and set a time-bound goal to eliminate all deaths on our streets. Advocates have called for collective efforts that bring together different stakeholders to fundamentally change the way we build and manage our transportation system, with specific focus on engineering, evaluation and enforcement. And, in many cases, the data has clearly shown that the neighborhoods that need the most attention to address deadly streets are the same low-income, communities of color that often bear the burden of disproportionate policing.

Granted, this is a hugely complicated topic. But, for many in the bike/ped movement, there's a clear intersection between these two movements. Both are focused on the same outcome: Making sure all residents are safe on our streets. Both have identified a common lever for change: Reforming police enforcement so it serves, rather than undermines, the needs of the community. And both have a unique opportunity: To mobilize residents who have been disenfranchised from political processes that impact their lives in deep and sometime deadly ways.

A couple of weeks ago, I joined a National Call on Transportation Equity featuring Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx hosted by PolicyLink. Tamika Butler, the Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition (pictured right) was on the call, too — and she asked a question that's on many people's minds. "As policing is becoming more and more of an issue in this country — though, for many low-income folks, it's always been an issue — how do we balance our Vision Zero work with what that would mean for enforcement and what that could potentially mean for profiling in these low-income communities of color," Butler asked.

Given the momentum of Vision Zero and the rising conversation about community policing, I talked to Tamika more the next week about the intersections of bike equity and police enforcement. Again, this is a really difficult and complex topic. But leading advocates like Butler are beginning to integrate these intersections into their work. Here's what we talked about...

So, given your background in law and policy, I know a lot of folks have been asking you why you got into bicycle advocacy. But, since we're talking about enforcement, I'm going to flip that script and ask why did you want to become a lawyer?

It's not a great story [laugh]. In college, I had good grades and my parents said I had to be a lawyer or a doctor — and law school was shorter. I was definitely interested in law, though. I’d done a few internships at a law firm and I knew a lot of people who had been negatively impacted by law. In a lot of situations I felt it was happening because they just didn’t know the law or didn’t know anyone they could turn to for help. So I thought, especially since I came from the communities impacted, I could be one of those people to do that work.

You’ve got a lot of experience in policy work; how important is it to integrate equity or have that intentional lens when we're working to create policy initiatives, whether that be the federal Mayors Challenge or the localized Vision Zero movements?

I think the first thing is making sure the right people are at the table. In my experience in the bike world, which has been short, there are a lot of conversations with biking advocate amongst biking advocates about the people who should be included, but it’s just an internal conversation. Whether it law enforcement or community members or social justice advocates or whatever it might be, as part of the conversation of talking about the Mayors Challenge or Vision Zero or a helmet law, just talking with people and getting outside of that bike bubble to understand how other people might see it and the concern that might pop up is really important.

In your interview with Streetsblog a few months back, you mentioned that with any policy you worry about enforcement. Why?

I think that’s coming from two places. First, being a lawyer and being in that legal area, and, second, being an African American person in this country. I’m not a person that really tends to think people are coming from a malicious place, but I think there’s a lot of unintended effects and consequences — and sometimes intended consequences. When we look at enforcement of many different types of things, whether it’s requiring people to have a bike license or have a helmet, or the different sentences for crack or cocaine, we have a history in this country of enforcing laws differently for different groups of people. We can’t talk about any sort of law, whether it’s related to drugs or traffic enforcement without thinking about that aspect. And without thinking about policing. Though many people may think Ferguson and Baltimore are isolated incidents, it’s something that people of color live with every day. When you look at enforcement and sentencing, there are different experiences in this country tied to the color of your skin. It might make people uncomfortable to talk about it, but we have to. Bike advocates need to be engaged in this conversation, all of us, not just those who have directly experienced it.

Certainly, one recent instance of discriminatory enforcement in the bike realm was what we saw in Tampa, with the wildly disproportionate ticketing of black cyclists for lack of registration. I know some folks have thought there's a strange silence from bike advocates, maybe particularly at the national level, when those types of egregious abuses happen — but the targets are people of color.

I think we had that same question. One thing I’ve been doing a lot in the first few months is talking to different people who ride bikes in different communities and just asking: why aren’t folks in this community members of LACBC? Why don’t we partner more with your group? There is a perception, not just with the national groups, but of bicycle advocacy groups at all levels, that we either don’t get it or that we don’t care. And I think that’s going to take some time to shift. It’s starting to shift a little bit. It’s certainly being talked about more. This Vision Zero work is going to be an important crossroads for the movement: how are we handling race and inequity in the context of our work is going to take center stage. People will be watching as we make this such a big part of all of our work, as we should and as they should.

So what does that look like? A Vision Zero policy or movement that adequately addresses equity and enforcement?

Well, I think for us internally we’ve had the conversation and we’ve internally decided what matters to us. The city is moving on their own parallel path to push out their Vision Zero plan. We’ve talked to them and said, “This is a concern; enforcement is going to come up.” So it’s in everybody’s mind. When we’re talking about the high injury networks we’re talking about very specific neighborhoods and we’re identifying who we should be engaging with to do Vision Zero work strategically. So we’re not only thinking about who do we want to work in coalition with, but who should be leading it? What voices do we want to highlight? We need to think about that from the beginning so, as we approach the police department and the city and different agencies we know, as a collective, we have the voices in the room to be hitting the right issues, speaking with authenticity, and really highlighting the intersectionality of the issue and our work.

Pulling back to the bigger picture, I've had the sense that, not only is there a lot of buzz about equity in our movement, but there's a recognition that bike/ped advocacy organizations could or should be allied with these powerful movements for police reform and racial justice writ large. BUT, at the same time, there's also the recognition that these are deeply complicated matters and we wonder how can we possibly have an impact? So on the one hand, we want to engage and on the other hand we're just completely overwhelmed. Are you tackling those types of questions within LACBC and, if so, how?

I think it’s a tricky question on both ends. Is there a way to do it that’s not overwhelming? The answer is no. These problems are really huge and when people really dig into it, it’s overwhelming. And that’s okay. But we’ve been able to start the conversation. In our newsletter during bike week, I wrote about how important Bike [to Work] Week is and how much fun we’re having, but that we can’t forget that the work we do happens every week; that we should be working for all community members; that a historical lack of attention leads to things like the uprising in Baltimore and bike advocacy has to be about so much more. Also during Bike Week I was on a couple of panels where we specifically talked about it and got some coverage on our local Streetsblog.

That’s the strategy we’re using now and it’s happening not only through me, but other staff members, as well. We’ve slowly started the conversation, saying, “Alright, so we’re going to try to do this — what does that look like?” We’re really just getting a buzz going, having people realize and start to talk about this more and just have people know, this is happening. We are talking about this. We are doing this. It is overwhelming, but if you talk about it it helps. Then you starting doing and it happens. In another newsletter, I talked about equity being one of our core principles — so we’re doing it in steps, we’re doing it authentically, and we’re doing it with the acknowledgement that it will take time.

And then I think it is hard to conceptualize how can we make an impact? Given limited resources, is it worth doing this? And I think, for us, the answer is yes. This isn’t an either or, how do I prioritize with my resources. This is a yes, you do it, you always do it. In some ways, all resources are tied to this work on fighting inequities. We are focusing on it at the expense of other work, but rather to bolster all the work we do and make it stronger. There are a lot of problems that are hard to solve. World hunger is hard to solve, but if you don’t even enter the conversation then you can’t make it something that you’re trying to address. For us, we know it may be a problem that will feel very hard to tackle, but we’re going to give it our best and talk about and do it — and see what happens.

We'll be continuing these types of conversation here at the Alliance, so stay tuned for more from leaders like Butler. And keep an eye out for a webinar on this topic later in the summer. If you're not already, follow @LACBC and @TamikaButler on Twitter.

If you haven't yet, check out Advocacy Advance’s latest resource, “Active Transportation Equity: A Scan of Existing Master Plans” — and follow us @BikeWalk on Twitter. Photo from the Alliance Photo Library.