Would More Policing Keep Sacramento Roads Safer?

SACRAMENTO -- Iris Flores was sitting in the courtroom the day the man who killed her husband was sentenced to 120 days in jail.

Before Juan Ramon Flores was fatally hit by a car while on an evening walk Feb. 24, 2023, he could always brighten your day with a joke or — if you were lucky — a silly little dance. He’d been retired for more than a decade, but Iris still worked nights. When she arrived home at 2 in the morning, Juan would be waiting on the porch waiting with a hot cup of coffee. The pair would stay up chatting.

Four months for ending her husband’s life? She couldn’t square it.

After the sentencing in June, she started seeing a speed trap along Rio Linda Boulevard, the road where the crash occurred. Although it has a posted limit of 40 mph, Juan’s youngest son, Ramon, 19, said he regularly sees drivers hurtling through the residential Del Paso Heights neighborhood at 60 mph or faster. They both thought the speed trap didn’t do much.

“It’s not helping,” Iris said. “People don’t care.”

So when Iris learned that Sacramento’s draft emergency declaration over the city’s crisis of cyclist and pedestrian deaths called for more policing of drivers, she was a little baffled.

The investigation found the driver acted with simple negligence, making the crime a misdemeanor under California law. The sentence was about all that prosecutors could offer.

In Iris’ view, the criminal justice system had done very little for her family.

However, she noted prosecutors had accomplished more than the city’s Department of Public Works, which has done nothing to change the intersection where Juan was killed.

The department’s road safety efforts are almost entirely reliant on grant funding, and the Sacramento City Council has not funded a program to implement quick fixes to dangerous roads. And so, Iris said, Rio Linda and South Avenue remains perilous a year and a half after her husband’s death, and more than three years since a two-vehicle crash killed Amritpal Singh, 61, and Ryan Jacob Murphy, 38, at the same intersection.

Vice Mayor Caity Maple submitted the proposed state of emergency declaration along with Mayor Pro Tem Karina Talamantes and Mayor Darrell Steinberg under pressure to act on road safety amid an ongoing crisis. Though the city’s leaders made a “Vision Zero” promise in 2017 to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2027, they remain far from fulfilling that commitment.

At least 26 people have died this year on city streets: Mattie Nicholson, 56; Kate Johnston, 55; Jeffrey Blain, 59; Aaron Ward, 40; Michael Kennedy, 40; Federico Zacarias Cambrano, 28; Marvin Moran, 22; Sam Dent, 41; Daniel Morris, 38; Terry Lane, 55; David Rink, 51; Tyler Vandehei, 32; James Lind, 54; Valladolid, 36; Larry Winters, 76; Sau Voong, 84; Edward Lopez, 61; Silva, 55; Geohaira “Geo” Sosa, 32; Kaylee Xiong, 18; Muhammad Saddique, 64; Azure Daniels, 48; Duane Ashby, 35; Martin Chavez, 41; Daniel Lee Jennings, 54; and Jordan Rodriguez, 38.

Of those, 16 were pedestrians or cyclists and two of whom were on scooters.

Advocates have publicly urged council members to prioritize funding for infrastructure improvements over policing in the emergency declaration, which has not yet been voted on.

At a Sacramento City Council meeting last month, Kiara Reed, executive director of the transportation policy organization Civic Thread, told city leaders that “research overwhelmingly points to roadway design as the most effective measure to reduce fatalities and injuries resulting from traffic collisions.”

Outside of public meetings, Iris and three others who have lived through life-altering crashes echoed many of the advocates’ concerns.

Among them was Alena Wong, 17, who was struck by a car five years ago while riding her bike to school. She pointed out that in many cases, police couldn’t have helped even if they had been present.

No crime in crash that almost killed 12-year-old

After the car crash that almost killed Wong, officers with the Sacramento Police Department noted the crumpled Schwinn on the asphalt. The bike wasn’t far from the puddle of blood where the 12-year-old had lain unconscious. They spoke with the teenage driver and his passenger the morning of Oct. 12, 2019. They had to wait to get a full statement from Wong, who was rushed to the hospital with a snapped femur and a broken jaw.

The middle-schooler spent months recovering from her broken bones and her traumatic brain injury. Days before the five-year anniversary of the crash, she had another emergency dental surgery on one of her broken teeth.

In their investigation, police concluded that the person who broke the law that day was Wong. She activated the flashing pedestrian signal and rode her bike through the crosswalk at Sutterville Road and Mead Avenue, where she was hit by a driver who’d been traveling east at the speed limit — 35 mph. The crash could have easily killed her.

“As a bicyclist,” the police report says, “(Wong) is in violation.”

That’s in line with many other serious crashes in the city. Data from UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows that of 614 crashes that either seriously injured or killed a pedestrian within city limits between 2013 and the end of 2023, about 30% were considered the driver’s fault, but more than half were considered the pedestrian’s fault.

So when Wong, now a senior at C.K. McClatchy High School, learned that the city’s draft state of emergency declaration on cyclist and pedestrian safety directed police to step up enforcement of drivers, she was dismayed. She does not believe that police have a large role to play in crash prevention.

“The only thing (police) could do is regulate speed, but they can’t stop every car,” Wong said. “If we were to change the infrastructure, it could make it so the cars could really only go the safer speed.”

She noted that police couldn’t have done anything at all to prevent her near-fatal crash because the driver was traveling at the speed limit.

“Having just started a government class,” she said, “we talked about what the government should provide the people with, and one of the main things was to keep its people safe.” It is, she said, “insulting” that she isn’t safe on city streets.

Although some severe or deadly crashes in Sacramento are the result of criminal driver behavior, many, as in Wong’s case, occur on streets that allow drivers to travel at lethal speeds. The city’s Vision Zero plan cites the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: When a pedestrian is hit by a vehicle traveling 20 mph, the risk that the pedestrian will die is 5%. By the time the speed increases to 30 mph — slower than the driver who hit Wong — the risk that the pedestrian will die is 40%.

Like Iris, Wong noted that the city’s Department of Public Works had not made structural changes to the intersection where she was hit so that traffic would be forced to slow. The draft emergency resolution echoed calls from Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela and would direct the city manager to “work with the Public Works department to identify, fund, and implement ‘quick-build’ or ‘tactical urbanist’ solutions in the highest-risk areas.”

Smaller-scale responses to safety hazards could accelerate the city’s progress on its goals to stop traffic deaths. But the draft emergency resolution did not actually come with any funding for such a program.

Few citations for Sacramento crosswalk violations

The initial draft of the resolution to declare a state of emergency states, “The city manager is further directed to work with the Sacramento Police Department to ramp up enforcement of traffic laws that protect pedestrians, including speed limit enforcement, crosswalk violations, and distracted driving. The City shall prioritize enforcement in high-injury corridors and areas with frequent pedestrian activity.”

In recent years, the Police Department has unevenly enforced certain laws related to cyclist and pedestrian safety. Citation data published by the city shows that police issued more than 1,200 citations to drivers for speeding and distracted driving in 2023. But between Jan. 1, 2023 and Aug. 31, 2024, data published by the city does not show a single citation for drivers who gave cyclists less than the mandated three feet of passing space. In 2023, the data shows that officers handed out nine driver citations for failing to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks. Through Aug. 31 of this year, the department had issued seven citations under three laws related to yielding to pedestrians.

The data indicate that the department issued more crosswalk-related citations during a sting operation at one Midtown intersection on Sept. 3 than it had in the previous 21 months.

A spokesperson for the Sacramento Police Department did not respond to a request for a comment.

Sherry Martinez was still in favor of some increases to policing. A driver ran her down in midtown and severely injured her on Aug. 12, 2023, in front of multiple witnesses, and he believes that drivers should face more consequences, including more citations, for endangering people around them.

She was 42 at the time of the crash, and she sustained a concussion, fractured her collarbone, broke four ribs and suffered tissue damage so deep that she has a bruise on her thigh, more than a year later. She’s returned to cycling, but she feels afraid whenever she rides alone. She thinks about what might have happened had she not been with two friends that day.

And the aftermath made her realize just how lax the consequences for reckless drivers seemed to be sometimes. Although she was hit in August, prosecutors did not press charges until June. Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Shelly Orio declined to comment on the pending case, but charges were filed shortly after Martinez spoke out at multiple public meetings and took her story to CBS 13.

Martinez is relieved that the case is now proceeding in the courts, but she has made a point to appear at all the driver’s court dates because she doesn’t trust that the criminal justice system will work without her advocacy.

Previously, she said, “I had faith in the system.” She used to think it was “designed for safety.” She said she couldn’t understand why the motorist was allowed to continue driving after the crash.

“This isn’t a video game,” she said. “We don’t have extra lives.” While she supports infrastructure improvements, she said more ticketing could help curb dangerous driving.

Martinez was hit at the same intersection — J and 24th streets — where police conducted their sting operation and caught dozens of drivers violating pedestrian safety laws. José Luis Silva, a motorcyclist, was killed at that intersection in August. Sacramento considers both streets to be part of its “high-injury network” — those city streets where the highest numbers of severe and fatal crashes occur.

With that in mind, Wong said she believed police couldn’t do much to solve problems on dangerous roads.

“I think the infrastructure is at fault,” she said. “So then what are the police gonna do? Blame the infrastructure?”

A deadly crash and a long wait for charges

Another widow, Mayra Miranda, said the criminal justice response to her husband’s death has been inadequate. Her husband, Jose Valladolid Ramirez, 36, was hit June 10 by a man who police immediately booked on charges of driving under the influence and drug possession.

Since then, Miranda has waited for word on the criminal case against the motorist. Valladolid was fatally struck while riding his bike on Fruitridge Road and 88th Street. Orio said prosecutors have “declined to file charges at this time pending further investigation.”

Miranda said no prosecutor had contacted her. Orio did not address that or comment further on the reasons for the lack of charges in this case, though she did say that with vehicular homicide, it was “not uncommon for this process to sometimes take six months or more to complete depending on the complexity of the case.”

Miranda said she believed the delay may be due to a fact that emerged in the coroner’s report: Valladolid had methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death. But, she noted, police said the suspect was under the influence, too.

The criminal justice response did not feel to her like it honored the dignity of the human life that was lost. The delays made her feel, she said, that the system was treating Valladolid’s death “like an animal just died. Like a cat or a dog just passed away.”

Miranda and Valladolid had a complicated relationship at the end of his life, and the two had separated. But they were still raising two children together, and Miranda saw him frequently. He was teaching their kids to fix cars. Their younger child, Amayrani, just started ninth grade.

“Me and my daughter are the ones that,” Miranda trailed off. “I can’t even describe my pain.”

Miranda’s husband was the third person to die on Fruitridge Road this year. Two pedestrians — James C. Lind and David Rink — were killed in March and April.

Speaking about the proposed state of emergency declaration, she said, “You’re telling me that there’s no funding to fix the roads and stuff? That’s ridiculous.”

Iris agreed. She hoped the city would put speed bumps on Rio Linda Boulevard or a roundabout at the intersection where her husband was fatally struck — something to force drivers to slow down. She told the judge that she felt “broken,” and that the two young grandchildren he often cared for had been asking to see him.

Iris thought more tickets wouldn’t really solve the problem.