Posted on 12/26/2013 11:36:57 AM PST by DariusBane
LOS ANGELES — In a city of seemingly endless highways — with its daily parade of car accidents, frustrating traffic jams and aggressive drivers — the Los Angeles Police Department these days is training its sights on a different road menace: jaywalkers.
It is not quite “Dragnet,” but the Police Department in recent weeks has issued dozens of tickets to workers, shoppers and tourists for illegally crossing the street in downtown Los Angeles. And the crackdown is raising questions about whether the authorities are taking sides with the long-dominant automobile here at the very time when a pedestrian culture is taking off, fueled by the burst of new offices, condominiums, hotels and restaurants rising in downtown Los Angeles.
The police say they are simply trying to maintain order at a time when downtown Los Angeles, once a place of urban tumbleweeds and the homeless, is teeming with people competing for pavement with automobiles. “There’s a huge influx of folks that come into the downtown area,” said Sgt. Larry Delgado of the Central Traffic Division. “If you go out there, you are going to see enforcement.”
Still, the enforcement has struck many of the pedestrians — the new kids on the block — as more than a little one-sided and strikingly strict. When Adam Bialik, a bartender, stepped off the curb on his way to work at the Ritz-Carlton a few blinks after the crossing signal began its red “Don’t Walk” countdown, he was met by a waiting police officer on the other side of the street and issued a ticket for $197.
“I didn’t even know that was against the law,” he said. “I was like, ‘You are the L.A.P.D., and this is what you are doing right now?’ ”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I really didn’t care about the intent of the article. New York City is the last city on earth that should try to export it’s scintillating way of life.
I would have to ask myself - is there nothing better I could be doing as a law enforcement officer other than handing out jaywalking tickets? No other crimes in LA that need attention?
Most SoCons would be more likely to identify as "limited government", rather than "small government".
That said, California has always been more aggressive with Jaywalking than east coast cities, at least in part because of a quirk in the state vehicle code that gives the right of way to a pedestrian in a crosswalk, marked or unmarked pretty much all of the time. The linked article is pretty clear that the primary motivation for tasking their traffic officers with jaywalking enforcement is the negative effect it has on traffic. I drove through this part of downtown just the other day, and it was pretty clear that the jaywalking was out of hand just in terms of moving in a straight line. Forget about trying to make a turn.
Do you think that people could be made to cooperate without enormous fines? Maybe use this horde of cops to interact with the public, gain willing cooperation?
Gee, that just might work.
And the homeless sure as heck wouldn't pay a $197 ticket!
I doubt that a "warning" would be as memorable as getting a ticket. Who knows, maybe they're doing that too, as well as writing a few tickets.
Seems to be enough of them to lurk downtown and harass peds. That qualifies as a “horde” in my book. In fact one azzhat with the full power and authority of The State qualifies as a horde. Try taking one on and see if he is not a “horde”.
One day I was walking to a sandwich shop to get lunch. A bunch of morons were jaywalking across a busy street, texting away, and completely oblivious to their surroundings; so much so that they didn't realize that they were jaywalking in front of a Sheriff's deputy until he yelled "If you're gonna jaywalk, could you at least put down the phone?!" over his loudspeaker at them.
(My other pet peeve is bicyclists who can't figure out which side of the road is the right one; or that the sidewalk isn't part of the road. Twice last week I almost killed the same guy who was riding on the wrong side of the road, at night, with no lights.)
Seattle is one place where jaywalkers have never been tolerated. When I was in the seventh grade and fresh from Eastern Washington I jaywalked diagonally across Beacon Ave and S. Myrtle St. The cop read me the riot act and gave me a ride home. And I got ticketed for jaywalking when I attended the UW. So Seattle residents just don’t normally do it. When I worked in Olympia you could always tell the people from Seattle because they didn’t jaywalk, whereas the natives had no fear.
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