On the streets of Seattle, 130 vendors sell non-profit Real Change’s weekly newspaper for $2 apiece. They’re no strangers to police attention: King county has a law requiring all cyclists to wear a helmet, but not all do. Some vendors on bicycles have received citations; others are just stopped by police.
But on 19 March 2019, a vendor was riding a bright green rental bike when a driver struck him in a hit-and-run. Witnesses said the driver was at fault. As the vendor lay on the street, receiving medical treatment before going to the hospital, police officers mocked him. Ultimately, the man – who was homeless and of self-described “mixed-race” – received a citation for not wearing a helmet. The driver received no citations at the scene.
“How they treat this driver is a far cry different from how they treat the vendor,” said Tiffani McCoy, advocacy director for Real Change. The organisation, which advocates for homeless and low-income people, edited officers’ body camera footage into a five-minute video that was released in November 2020 as a form of activism.
The video helped start a conversation in Seattle questioning the fairness of the 1993 bike helmet law. Now, with demands for racial justice ringing across the country, some individuals and organisations are calling for the repeal of the law and the city is auditing how police use it. But others question whether this move could compromise safety for cyclists – using a helmet is associated with a 51% reduction in the odds of head injury and a 65% reduction in fatal head injury.
The conversation could also have ripple effects in the country: Black cyclists are disproportionately stopped in New Orleans, Washington DC and Oakland, California, and law enforcement policies have often overlooked inequity in their system. In Dallas, police have used helmet laws to stop and question cyclists in neighbourhoods of colour, according to a 2014 analysis by the Dallas Morning News. And a 2016 study by the Department of Justice found that Black people accounted for 73% of bicycle stops in Tampa, Florida, while only making up 26% of the population.
In Seattle, where the debate has heated up, 43% of helmet citations since 2017 have gone to people who are homeless, according to an analysis by the news outlet Crosscut. A separate study of about 1,700 helmet infractions since 2003 shows that Black cyclists received citations at nearly four times the rate of white cyclists, while Native cyclists were cited at double the rate.
“It’s really unlikely that these disparities and citation issuance come out of a situation where police are enforcing this law equitably,” said Ethan C Campbell, a doctoral student at the University of Washington. He conducted the racial infraction analysis for Central Seattle Greenways, a grassroots group working to make the city safe for walking and biking.
Some cities have already started to change their policies. Tacoma, Washington, repealed its helmet law in 2020 after looking at research showing that more people of colour receive tickets.
But while all sources stressed to the Guardian that cyclists should wear helmets for safety reasons, they disagreed on how these laws should work.
Many governments enacted helmet laws in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like jaywalking ordinances, helmet laws can disproportionately burden people of colour and low-income populations, said Charles T Brown, CEO of urban planning firm Equitable Cities and adjunct professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University.
“It is important for all cyclists to wear helmets, though I don’t think it’s something that should be mandated by law,” Brown said. “They’re being used as a pretext to stop individuals suspected of more serious drug and weapon charges. But in many cases throughout the US, you don’t find sufficient evidence to support that stop in terms of reducing these more serious crimes.”
Others say striking laws could create a more dangerous situation for cyclists. About 200 localities, plus 22 states, have laws requiring bike helmets at least for kids under 16, said Randy Swart, executive director, founder and lead volunteer of the non-profit Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute. He said repealing the law sends a message that it’s OK to ride without a helmet.
Swart also said it’s important to put helmet laws in context with speeding, seatbelt and other regulations that have been used disproportionately against people of colour.
“I consider it a police problem as opposed to a law problem,” said Swart, who supports helmet laws. “You don’t repeal the law. You reform your police department.”
Uneven enforcement of helmet laws mirrors longstanding issues with policing. Campbell said this includes laws that require bike lights and ban riding on sidewalks.
“They provide a pathway for police to essentially conduct these discretionary investigatory stops, which we know from traffic stops of drivers happen disproportionately against Black and Hispanic drivers,” Campbell said.
“The same goes for cyclists. It’s a really easy way for police to check out someone without really adequately justifying that stop, without giving a rationale for why they’re doing so. And that’s deeply troubling because it’s not the way that these laws were meant to be used.”
In the wake of 2020’s racial justice protests, Central Seattle Greenways formed a helmet law working group. Central Seattle Greenways hasn’t called for a repeal of King county’s law – just a re-evaluation – but some group members including Real Change have.
“This is a law that is not being used in the way that it’s intended,” McCoy of Real Change said. “There are just so many ways that different jurisdictions try to criminalize poverty and treat the symptoms as opposed to the cause. And this is one law that we now know for certain is used as a way to criminalize poverty and in a racially motivated way.”
Seattle’s office of inspector general is planning to conduct an audit into Seattle police department’s helmet citation practices in terms of race and housing status. The King county board of health added studying the “disparate impacts” of helmet enforcement to its 2021 work plan, according to the Seattle Times.
But there are measures beyond helmet laws and policing that can help ensure the safety of all cyclists. Campbell said low-income communities could have greater access to helmets through subsidy programs. Some people in King county have proposed including free or subsidised helmets with bike purchases, though that doesn’t cover the sales of used bikes on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. It also doesn’t cover rental bikes, like the one the Real Change vendor was using when he was hit.
Meanwhile, safety advocates have acknowledged that helmets do not prevent crashes from happening and have sought to reduce collisions with cars. Since December 2019, Seattle has lowered speed limits to 25 miles an hour on 415 miles of streets. Case studies in five neighbourhoods show a 20% to 40% drop in the number of collisions in places with new speed limit signs.
Brown also called for proper lighting for nighttime riding, protected bike lanes and recreational trail networks that connect to key destinations. This infrastructure should offer bike lockers, and employers should have showers in their buildings.
“Before there is law, there should be investment and bicycle infrastructure in the communities that need the investments the most,” Brown said. “We can advocate rightly for the use of helmets without sending people to jail, giving them fines and potentially harming them for not doing so.”