"Obeying the law" is irrelevant. It's not illegal to use a phone while walking, like it is while driving. The statement in the OP could be 100% correct and still not address the issue of whether distracted pedestrians are contributing to their own injury statistics.
That only helps in punishing the wrongdoer. If you can avoid being a victim in the first place, yes, the wrongdoer will get away with doing something wrong (though much less wrong than if you succeeded in becoming a victim; e.g., he's guilty of running a red light rather than running a red light and causing a crash that resulted in someone's death), but the price you pay for making the wrongdoer guilty of a greater crime (homicide) is your life. Is that really worth it?
The whole right vs. wrong thing is only useful in assigning blame when something really bad happens, and society wants to punish someone to achieve "justice". But having justice isn't really useful if you're dead, and not really worth it IMO if you're maimed for life. It's better to avoid the whole incident in the first place. "Justice" is nothing more than a concept society created to prevent people from seeking personal vengeance.
In the end though, Homer Simpson is still a bad safety supervisor. Just telling people to "Safen up!" is pointless and in this case is a way of distracting from an important truth ... that the problem here is cars and their drivers, not the pedestrians and cyclists. The legend of the reckless everyone else but drivers is less accepted these days and people tend to get called on it.