I refer to the Seattle Police officer who struggled with two women on film, punching one in the face over a jaywalking citation:
This video shows the bulk of it, but it is missing the context of the initial encounter. Suffice to say, Police were enforcing jaywalking ordinances on some dangerous intersections.
http://www.youtube.com/...
I think this incident stems more from poor relationships between police and the community. While individual incidents often are due to people resisting arrest or overreacting to getting tickets/citations, the source of the tension is a fundamental mistrust between the community and the police. This is largely the fault of police training that emphasizes intimidation over deescalation but the elephant in the room is the War on Drugs which has largely been fought as a war on the people in poor neighborhoods and on poor and minority individuals virtually everywhere they go. While police are officially told not to profile, unofficially they are basically required to profile in order to meet expectations (read: quotas) for drug and other relatively petty arrests.
If you have a generally good relationship with the police and trust that they are not targeting you because of your socio-economic status then when you get pulled over or questioned over something minor and get a ticket, it's like "shit, its just not my lucky day" but when you basically live in fear of endemic police harassment and abuse, often done under the pretext of low priority crimes like jaywalking, littering, spitting, loitering, noise, minor vehicle infractions, etc, then your reaction to being stopped for one of those crimes is to assume it is merely a pretext for additional searches, and general harassment due to your status.
Unfortunately police are being trained to be too confrontational because they are told that it will decrease the chances of getting hurt by suspects when in reality it probably just provokes more incidents, increases the chances of unjustified shootings, worsens community relations, and generally makes police the enemy and their beats, just occupied territory. The War on Drugs and policing strategies have made even middle and upper middle class whites generally distrustful of police and hardened those views among minorities and the poor.
The smart move for the police would have been to warn people verbally about jaywalking at that intersection and not bother issuing citations. Tell people how many pedestrians have been hit there, tell them that they can be ticketed and police are going to be ticketing there. That makes the community view the police as promoting their safety and not as racially motivated harassers or just capricious revenue collectors.