Originally published by The Los Angeles Times:
This one is personal.
Just over 10 years ago, I was ticketed – and handcuffed – for an alleged pedestrian violation while crossing Melrose Avenue. Ironically, this was one of the rare times that I was innocent of even jaywalking, something I do every day.
Anyway, I had done everything right. I waited for the green “walking man” signal before stepping off the curb. I walked between the crosswalk lines. I got across the street just as the flashing red signal began.
All of a sudden, a motorcycle officer zoomed over, threw me up against the wall, slapped on the cuffs, roughed me up and wrote me a ticket. It was an ugly scene, and in broad daylight it must have looked like one, because within minutes there were a couple of dozen passersby shouting at the cop.
Another motorcycle officer appeared, asked the colleague what the heck he was thinking and ordered him to let me go, which he did. But not before he threw my driver’s license into the sewer.
I filed a formal complaint with the Los Angeles Police Department. A few months went by without my hearing anything, so I called to check in. I was told that the complaint was dismissed. They had never notified me.
Stories about the LAPD’s current ticketing crackdown against people who enter the crosswalk after the pedestrian crossing signal has begun flashing red and counting down reminded me of my incident. The Times reports that the LAPD has ticketed four times as many pedestrians for this violation in the division that includes downtown than in other areas of the city.
Is this really a worthwhile use of police resources? Two City Council members have asked for data on whether such tickets really improve public safety.
As Times columnist Steve Lopez points out, the price of these tickets – $197 – is wildly out of proportion to the scale of the so-called “offense.” Moreover, few Angelenos know that stepping into the crosswalk after the red flash of death starts is against the law. “Many… think, as I did, that the countdown is there to tell you how much time you have to cross the street,” writes Lopez.
Because, you know, it’s a countdown. In seconds. If you are familiar with the space-time continuum, and you have crossed the particular street before, you’re probably able to judge with a fair degree of accuracy whether you will be able to make it across in time. Why show the countdown if we aren’t supposed to use that information?
At a certain point, it’s easy to conclude that this is less about pedestrian safety than it is about revenue enhancement. Besides, how safe is the scenario I depict in my cartoon, in which people are racing across intersections at breakneck speed in order to avoid paying nearly $200 in fines?
6 Comments.
Wow, can’t believe they did that to a white guy. I do remember being 17, in 1979, in LA, New York kid, and getting hassled for standing off the curb waiting for a break in traffic to cross. Some cop pulled over and told me to get back on the curb or he would ticket me, I somehow refrained from laughing and did it, but was very confused. Why would a cop care when I crossed? Didn’t they have better things to do, like harassing minorities? I spent the rest of my time in LA investigating what happened when I started crossing randomly, and was amazed to discover that cars actually stopped – in NY the thing to do was to try to just miss pedestrians as you went by, just to mess with their heads. It was a game. It’s not that the police in NY are any great shakes, but LA has always been a police state, plain and simple.
In this Utopia of Rules, beware of bureaucrats with weapons.
See David Graeber.
Seriously? Handcuffs for a minor infraction? Damn, I believe I would have found an attorney and filed a civil suit. 🙁
If “people are racing across intersections at breakneck speed in order to avoid paying nearly $200 in fines,” then soon, if not already, there will be a $300 fine for speeding, on foot, within a crosswalk.
So, do’ya think this has nothing to do with international politics? America is BROKE! It is now a nation of “service” industries where we make a piddling amount of cash washing each other’s laundry. Well, guess what, the tyrannical pig-class is the new Mafia. And what used to pass even for just middle-class? They are the new cock-suck bitches of the national badge-dangler’s club.
So, do’ya also really think that court-house judges are going to side with us latest versions of low-class, hoi-polloi? Well, guess what, unless you are a card-carrying, life-time member of America’s criminal police-state, I DON’T CARE WHAT YOUR SKIN-TONE, MELANIN CONTENT IS, WE’RE ALL NIGGERS NOW. The judges are just an upper-crust decider of the pig-class. They absolutely need the pigs to collect their own opulent wages. It’s symbiotic cooperation at its most vicious.
The only place left where the cop-class knows that there may still be some cash left to collect for their paycheck enhancements is by way of highway robbery against the local population. YOU WILL PAY, either with cash, or involuntary servitude. THE PIGS HAVE NO CHOICE, either they oppress the money out of you, or they join you in common poverty. So, as just a para-military fraction of the population with a quite admittedly over-abundant access to military-grade hardware, the badge-danglers will rob your homes and prostitute your children to their quasi-Skull-and-Bone masters rather than ever even contemplate doing any remotely even honest work, because they also are blood-thirstily addicted to their own violent power over the masses.
Ultimately? I fear that the general population is going to have to do a French-style revolution thing, where — in order to survive beyond the police-state — they’re going to have to slaughter every last one of their self-righteously deluded, badge-dangling gangbangers, just to prove to them the point that the disease of tyranny will be violently eliminated when it finally becomes just too oppressive, even for the stupid-class.
Every few generations, it’s a lesson that apparently must be taught over and over again, ad-nauseum. The only other alternative is that the pig-class gains the technology to wipe all the rest of us out … upon which they will then turn on themselves, and extinction inevitably results.
There will be no white knights in shining armor then.
DanD
Cops go after pot smokers with much more zeal than crack houses. Why? Because pot heads are much less likely to be armed.
Jaywalkers are likewise less likely to use lethal force to avoid the fine, than say … oh … muggers or Mafiosi.