Social Justice to the Point of Bodily Injury

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, April 09, 2025

 

Despite all the present uncertainty, there’s comfort to be found in the consistency with which America’s dark-blue urban enclaves eagerly import and implement all the world’s worst ideas.

 

Elected officials in San Francisco might not have been following the political controversy that erupted in the U.K. over the last several months following the Sentencing Council for England and Wales’s stubborn insistence upon introducing a tiered system of justice based on the offender’s race, creed, and gender. The abandonment of a neutral principle of justice in favor of something approximating the idea of social justice, in which minorities are afforded special dispensation to balance history’s scales, ignited a firestorm. Rather than avoid the pitfalls into which Britain’s identitarian dogmatists hurled themselves, San Francisco is consigning itself to that same fate.

 

In late March, the city launched a program based on California’s “pilot speed and safety camera program” that provides hardship relief to low-income residents who are captured violating speed limits on camera. “Violations for speeding range from $50 to $500, but individuals with a household income at or below 200% of the federal poverty level are eligible for a 50% discount, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency,” Fox News reported. “Indigent persons, or individuals who are homeless, are eligible for an 80% discount on the speeding ticket.”

 

This is consistent with programs advocated by progressive activists like the Vision Zero Network. “Fees, which are a tax tacked on to a fine for the purpose of raising money to fund government programs, can snowball, exacerbate income inequities and cause unintended harms,” they wrote. “For instance, in some places the failure to pay a speeding ticket on time may lead to consequences such as additional charges, suspension of driver’s licenses, revocation, or refusal to renew licenses, vehicle immobilization, and other punitive measures, all of which disproportionately affect economically vulnerable people.”

 

Yes, fines accrued as a result of lawbreaking “disproportionately affect economically vulnerable people” as a function of math. You know what else “disproportionately” affects lower-income Americans? Anything with a price tag attached.

 

Those controversial speed cameras are only located in areas where the “high injury” risk is elevated — streets that account for nearly 70 percent of severe or fatal traffic-related injuries. Presumably, the cameras serve as a deterrent to those who would otherwise drive recklessly through these intersections. This program mutes that very deterrent effect.

 

Are we to believe that if you’re “indigent” or “homeless,” you have better reasons for speeding through a busy intersection? Are the grand historical forces that compelled these individuals to languish in penury such that we should disregard their reckless actions that present a risk to others? Are the San Franciscans who suffer profound harm or even the loss of a loved one as the result of negligence or willful recklessness to take some solace in the notion that their city’s leniency absolves them of the karmic debt they inherited at birth?

 

Probably not. This program will likely engender the same resentment that the British experienced. Unlike Britain, San Francisco’s population is self-selected to the point that its residents have much more tolerance for injustices that could plausibly contribute to their righteous self-conception. And yet, everyone maintains a finite reserve of tolerance. At some point, everyone’s patience runs out.