LAPD Ticketing People For Walking

Chris | InformationLiberation
Dec. 27, 2013

Ticketing people for walking, or as the state calls it, "jaywalking," is apparently the newest growing source of revenue for the LAPD. Under the auspices of "public safety," Los Angeles police are doling out $197 tickets left and right to people for walking across the street, even when there is "not a car in sight."

From the New York Times:
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 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?’ ”

[...] Jeff Grotke, 49, a bankruptcy lawyer who works downtown, said he crossed a street midblock on the way to Bankruptcy Court when there was not a car in sight. He was stopped by two officers and given a ticket.

“Honestly, I cussed them out for about five minutes,” he said. “I told them what a stupid waste of time this was, and wasn’t it great that they had two police officers standing there when there are obviously more important issues out there.”
The most important issue to these cops is "revenue generation," which is more commonly known as extortion. If they're so shameless as to go around writing people $200 tickets for walking, I think their priorities are clear.
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Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.













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