The SPD will be cracking down on crosswalk violations this summer. Let me sidestep the usual “stupid pedestrians” versus “stupid drivers” argument and say that I like being safe in a crosswalk as much as the next guy, but I can understand how difficult it is for a driver to safely get through a crosswalk, especially at a “left turn” situation.
But that’s not why I’m posting this. Guess who they nailed in one of their stings?
Seattle driver Peter Sherwin, a former monorail activist, got ticketed on Stone Way North and says he’ll dispute the $124 fine. He said his view was obstructed by a parked SUV and that he had only 60 feet to react once the decoy, a woman wearing white, stepped off the curb.
“There was no way, at the point when I saw her, that I could stop, without being through the crosswalk,” said Sherwin.
But what really ices the cake is this:
Sherwin wondered why the stings aren’t more publicized. “This isn’t producing safety. This is producing revenue,” he said.
Because if anyone knows revenue, it’s one of those monorail guys, right?
Oh yeah, and the price of booze is going up due to the state needing more money.
Not an excuse, Sherwin. A defensive driver would take notice of the SUV, realize it may be obstructing the view of a person waiting to cross, and slow to an appropriate speed in case a stop is necessary.
Reminds me of the airport sting fiasco a few years ago. The Port of Seattle police put a wallet in plain view, and then waited in ambush to nab anyone who touched it. The courts threw all of those arrests out as “entrapment.” As you know, the airport cops have been involved in other highly publicized screwups too, including the infamous Steve Titus case. In fact, the whole Port of Seattle has repeatedly proved, over and over again, they’re a bunch of bungling idiots whose stupidity costs taxpayers big bucks. In the Titus case, their dishonesty and incompetence cost an innocent man his freedom (and ultimately his life) and the taxpayers a $2 million settlement with Titus’ children. A lying Port of Seattle (POS for short, also known as Piece of Shit) cop sent Titus to prison for a rape he didn’t commit, and although Titus eventually was freed, thanks to the investigative reporting of Seattle Times reporter Paul Henderson (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work on the Titus case), the stress literally killed him — he died of a heart attack in his 30s — and the legal settlement against the Port went to his children. The Port of Seattle is terminally fucked up and should be disbanded; they’re the last organization on earth that SPD should strive to copy or emulate, except maybe Al Qaeda.
So, how many of these Al Qaeda jaywalking tickets have been issued, so far?
@1 So?
@2 Let’s face it, Seattle drivers are stupid jerks, period. They talk on cell phones, they blow stop signs and red lights, they race through crosswalks, they ignore pedestrians and yield signs, they tailgate, they speed, they weave in and out of traffic, they don’t use their turn signals, they run over rabbits on Greenlake Way, and commit every other driving infraction ever invented and even some that haven’t been invented yet. One thing you gotta say for Seattle, this town is a hotbed of innovation! If there’s a new way to endanger other people, a Seattle driver will figure it out! No frontier will be left unconquered!
With all this illegal behavior going on around us every day, you’d think the cops would have plenty to do just ticketing those who violate the law on their own volition, without settting up decoys to suck people into violations. Who dreamed this up? Seems like someone in the SPD has too much time on his hands.
These tickets will suffer the same fate in the courts that the Airport Keystone Kops’ wallet sting arrests did.
Anyone caught in a pedestrian sting is a total fucking idiot. Just after I moved to Reno, the RPD set up a pedestrian sting on Sierra St. (one block west of Virginia, the main north-south artery) where it crossed the Truckee River, and anyone who failed to notice a fully uniformed officer talking into his wrist as he went back and forth across Sierra, with nearly a dozen RPD cruisers and bikes along the street in front of him, deserved to be ticketed, then humiliated on live local television.
“but I can understand how difficult it is for a driver to safely get through a crosswalk, especially at a “left turn” situation”
Are you serious? Why don’t you explain how difficult it is?
“The Port of Seattle is terminally fucked up”
Even though you didn’t intend it as such, that’s a great punch line!
@8 Allow me to explain. Will is now driving Roger Rabbit’s former wheels. Its minimum speed is 80 mph and it’ll do 100 if you even look at the accelerator pedal. It wasn’t designed for stopping. Rabbits like me shouldn’t be in possession of such machinery; after all, I used to be a Republican, and I still drive like one. I thought if I sold it to Will, it would be in safer paws.
6 Roger, you might as well be speaking of motorists everywhere. The really bizarre aspect is that we call this giant clusterfuck-on-wheels our “transportatation system”, and there are those who want to keep expanding it.
Why don’t you consider calling someone a “faggot” is an insult.
Would you stop for a “faggot” in a crosswalk?
Here’s a clue, you goatfucking faggot cunt. Our calling you a faggot cunt is not to belittle gays and women. It is to belittle you, you worthless goatfucking faggot cunt piece of shit.
05/05/2009 AT 8:46 PM
http://horsesass.org/?p=15786&.....ent-916253
Why not just apologize for being so insensitive to gays, admit you got carried away and say it will never happen again.
Not here in los angeles… Waaay too much traffic.
As a lifelong resident of southern California, until 11 years ago, from my vantage point Seattle drivers, and drivers in WA state in general……are the most fucked up drivers in America. Its like a slow moving herd of dumb animals. People stopping for no apparant reason, people holding up traffic to let some fucking numb skull make an ill advised left turn in the middle of a busy street, allowing someone to sit there at a green light without honking at the bastard to pull his head out of his ass and MOVE……and when I take it upon myself to blare my horn from 10 cars back, they turn around in unison and look at me like I AM the problem, Asians driving 40 MPH on the freeway when there is light traffic…….I could go on and on and on with an endless parade of examples of pure fuck headed driving habits of WA residents.
This is too damn funny.
It is Progressive Revenue-enhancement at it’s finest!
WHY? It only nails folks with cars.
How many homeless folks have cars?
Not many…and they only use them to sleep in.
It’s like a lottery aimed at wealthy CAR OWNERS.
Like I told you KLOWNS..first they come after me, but you ain’t far behind.
Look at it this way, it is a Progressive-based fee aimed only at wealthy CAR OWNERS.
That ought to make you sunken-chested KLOWNS puff up with a little bit of pride, huh?
Hey, be happy you got that ticket. It shows you are wealthy enough to own a car!
PS–
Why aren’t they ticketing bicyclists for the same thing. I’ve witnesses several close calls with bikers whizzing thru intersections.
Oh and forgot…biking is in-krowd, walking isn’t and car-driving sure as heck isn’t.
Perhaps this is yet another His PHATness’s boneheaded social engineering schemes to scare drivers out of their cars so only HE can drive!
13 Actually, to a degree you’re right, Marvin. LA drivers as a group are more competent and pay better attention to what they and each other are doing out of sheer necessity. Also, perhaps it’s a little more absurd to try to entertain the delusion that you’re more hot shit than the other 25 million people you’re sharing the local thoroughfares with. Our daughter lives in Santa Monica, so we’ve spent quite a bit of time in SoCal in recent years. I have to admit I get a lot less frustrated driving there than I do here.
Not that there haven’t been exceptions. I still occasionally have nightmares stemming from the time some idiot woman sailed by us on the Ventura Freeway with her three-year-old in the back seat, unbelted, half hanging out the window.
@12 “Why not just apologize for being so insensitive to gays, admit you got carried away and say it will never happen again.”
Here’s a better idea: Go fuck yourself.
I say about time. Walking in Seattle is taking your life in your hands. Crosswalk? what’s that. You mean I have to stop for people? If the SPD wants to hand out tickets go down to 4th and weller near the sounder station. Nobody stops for the crosswalk there. They could get fifty tickets a day. Cars doNOT have the right-of-way in a crosswalk.
13, 16 — When I’ve traveled in other states, almost without exception, the worst and most aggressive and pushiest and most obnoxious drivers on the road had California plates. Washington drivers are merely idiots compared to these California bastards.
@18 That was precisely my point @6 … why is the SPD wasting their time and resources using decoys to entrap people instead of simply ticketing the hordes of real offenders?
19 – You are confusing “obnoxious” and “pushy” with EFFICIENCY! Californians are by and large EFFICIENT drivers. Meaning, they don’t sit there behind someone making a left turn, they GO AROUND them. They don’t stop in the middle of the road unless there is some very good reason for doing so, as in….you know, they are about to hit the guy in front of them. They HONK at shit headed drivers that are holding up traffic while yacking away on their cell phone or otherwise have their head up their ass. Are you getting the picture?
This reminds me of a story Lem Howell told at a legal seminar many years ago.
I know where he’s coming from, as I had my own run-in with the Seattle parking ticket nazis, involving a car I no longer owned (and the sale of which I had properly reported, per state law).
Lem went downtown to dispute a parking ticket. I don’t remember the circumstances, but he felt he didn’t owe the ticket, and wanted to talk with someone. Not getting satisfaction from the window clerk, he asked to speak with a supervisor. He was told to wait a few minutes.
Five minutes later, two cops showed up and arrested him from disorderly conduct. Lem sued the city for false arrest and won a jury verdict of $18,000.
While that’s peanuts compared to the $225,000 that public records entrepreneur Stefan Sharansky got from the county — and he didn’t even have to get arrested and jailed to collect, which tells you how cockeyed our public records laws are — it was justice, of sorts.
In my case, I didn’t get a dime, just a lot of aggravation and time wasted fighting the parking ticket bureaucracy that was dunning me for a ticket I knew nothing about on a car I didn’t own. Eventually, a manager promised it would be taken care of, but it wasn’t; it reappeared two years later and I had to fight it all over again.
It simply popped back up in the computer system. This particular batch of city employees don’t have any brains; they let computers do all their thinking for them. When I told the window clerk I wanted to contest it in municipal court, and asked what the procedure was to request a court hearing, she acted like she didn’t know what a court was and had never heard of due process or the right to a hearing. The general attitude in that department is they can do whatever they want no matter what the law says, and no one can question it. I probably should have been a little sassier, so they would have arrested me, so I could have gotten $225,000 too. I’m at least as deserving as Stefan, and I worked far harder to get rid of that bogus parking ticket than he did to get 600,000 documents out of KCRE — after all, they gave him everything he asked for, and it took him 3 years to figure out which documents they overlooked.
The bottom line — and the point of this story — is that law enforcement bureaucracies aren’t necessarily competent, aren’t always right, but almost always are arrogant and inflexible; and above all, they are unwilling to be subject to any kind of oversight by the civilian community that employs them and pays their salaries. That’s not an acceptable situation. Unfortunately, the only means available to the citizenry of holding police departments accountable is to sue them, which is like suing yourself, because the taxpayers end up paying the judgments that result from police overreaching. And no cop, or cop supervisor, ever gets fired or demoted or disciplined for costing taxpayers big bucks by not doing their job right.
@21: It ain’t efficient to cause accidents and to run into and over people.
Also, Californians can’t drive for sh** in anything other than dry pavement and no snow. Get them up here and they are an accident waiting to happen. My favorite was the lady from California with ONE chain on….she could not figure out why shew was going in circles.
Ever try to drive in LA when it rains? That is not efficiency – it is stupidity.
@21 Try leaning on your horn behind me and see what happens to your steering wheel in relation to your neck.
Man what I wouldn’t give to see that traitor walking into some crosswalk near me…
“But officer I swear, my foot slipped and I pushed on the accelerator when I meant to hit the brake and couldn’t help but hit the big fat retard in the crosswalk at 70 MPH!”
According to this chart you need 47 feet to come to a stop if you’re going 30MPH. Sounds like Sherwin had plenty of room to me.
http://www.jmu.edu/safetyplan/.....ance.shtml
@12: Marvie the goatfucking faggot cunt. ‘nuf said.
19 & 21:
I have to agree with Roger that California drivers, however ‘efficient’ they may be, are certainly the most obnoxious and aggressive. A few days back on my courier route, I had to detour around the West Shore of Lake Tahoe on CA-89 and CA-28 because of overnight construction on the only East Shore highway, NV-28. And thanks to my band playing until 3:30am, my route brought me up to the lake at the beginning of Monday’s commute.
For those of you that have never driven around Lake Tahoe, the whole way ’round is beautiful, with the West Shore especially so. But the morning commuters on the West Shore were like rally-car drivers on PCP, relentlessly on my ass even though I was driving the posted limit of 55, and one actually had the stones to pass me on a 10mph hairpin! And nary a Chippie in sight….
In so many words, the California drivers that I see every damn day remind me of the hit-to-pass racers I used to know back on the Olympic Peninsula, that’s how they drive.
I love watching rich Progressives…rich meaning a CAR OWNER, getting all wound up about an issue that Seattle has handled very Progressively by raising revenue only on rich Car Owners.
PS–You own a Car==You are rich!!
“Walking in Seattle is taking your life in your hands.”
Seattle’s bad enough. Then, there’s Bellevue…
What’s the problem.
Are you upset that I exposed two of your fellow democrats as homophobes?
I understand you share the sentiment, hating me, but do you condone the words of steve and gbs?
Here’s a clue, you goatfucking faggot cunt. Our calling you a faggot cunt is not to belittle gays and women. It is to belittle you, you worthless goatfucking faggot cunt piece of shit.
05/05/2009 AT 8:46 PM
http://horsesass.org/?p=15786&.....ent-916253
So they gave him everything he asked for EXCEPT the documents they overlooked.
That makes sense.
Were you really a judge?
How many of your cases got over-ruled by another court?
@12 There are other folks posting here occasionally as “Steve”. You just found one. I bet he had a WTF? moment if he had bothered to read your post.
Obviously you want my attention like I have given steve for the same comment.
Sorry, you’re not worth it.
But feel free to continue to express your bigotry.
On this blog, the only leftie that is bothered by that kind of hatred is YLB, so don’t worry, no one will complain.
Damn.
Now it’s the “other” steve excuse.
Here’s a clue, you goatfucking faggot cunt. Our calling you a faggot cunt is not to belittle gays and women. It is to belittle you, you worthless goatfucking faggot cunt piece of shit.
05/05/2009 AT 8:46 PM
http://horsesass.org/?p=15786&.....ent-916253
Think how many pedestrians Sherwin would have killed if he’d gotten his dream monorail with giant concrete trestles every few feet built.
I think this state (and OR) take the prize on lookie lou’s.
@35 Whatever, Marvin.
@32 The Washington Supreme Court once overruled me for exceeding my authority. I did it intentionally.
@34 We don’t hate you wingnut swine. We feel sorry for you, because you’re so pathetic.
I’m surprised Sherwin wasn’t drunk when he got that ticket.