Civil Rights

Proof-of-payment speeds up bus service. But leaving enforcement up to police can violate passengers' rights, a Cleveland judge ruled.

State and local governments in much of the country use the threat of drivers license suspension to impose fines and sanctions that can entrap people in a vicious cycle of indebtedness.

You can't end discrimination in traffic stops if you don't know how bad the problem is, but only a handful of states collect comprehensive racial data on traffic enforcement. Now you can add one more to the list.

The concept of "jaywalking" has become deeply embedded in American culture, but if you go back just a few generations, the idea that your mere presence in the street could be illegal was a novel idea. Now one elected official in Seattle is suggesting that laws penalizing people outside of cars have gone too far.

When the line between a legally justifiable stop and outright harassment is so thin, it can easily become a pretext for racial profiling.

Missouri, like many other states, shifts transportation funds from cities to rural areas -- it collects most gas tax revenue from urban areas and spends it on roads in the hinterlands. And as in many other states, this amounts to a massive transfer of resources from the places where most people of color live.

Back in June, newly elected Maryland Governor Larry Hogan unilaterally cancelled a transit expansion project that Baltimore had been planning for a decade, transferring the state's promised investment to road projects in more rural parts of the state.

When the news came out yesterday that a Staten Island grand jury had failed to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo for killing Eric Garner with an illegal chokehold, like many people I found the outcome difficult to comprehend. With clear video evidence showing that Pantaleo broke NYPD protocol and a coroner's report certifying that Garner's death was a homicide, this grand jury should have reached the conclusion that had eluded grand jurors in the Michael Brown case in St. Louis County: There should be a trial to determine if Pantaleo had committed a crime. But apparently that's not how our justice system works.