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Drivers: That Pedestrian You Just Cut Off Might Be A Cop
By
Lauren Evans
Published Jan 27, 2014
Modified Jan 28, 2014
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Gothamist
By
Lauren Evans
Published Jan 27, 2014
Modified Jan 28, 2014
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Bill de Blasio has made it his goal to eliminate traffic deaths by 2024, and already the wheels (see?) are in motion to make it happen. Councilman Brad Lander, whose district covers Park Slope (and the recently reduced Prospect Park West that runs through it) announced today that police in that neighborhood are cracking down on drivers big time, ticketing with alacrity those who fail to yield to pedestrians crossing with the signal inside a crosswalk. They've handed out 16 summonses since last Thursday!
In a statement, Lander spoke not of a more hospitable environment for non-motorists, nor of preventing incidents like the death of Sammy Cohen Eckstein, a 12-year-old boy who was killed by the driver of a van on PPW last October. Instead, he opted to Talk Consequences.
“Drivers should know that the next pedestrian you fail to yield to may be an undercover cop,” Lander said.
"Failure to yield" is responsible for 27 percent of pedestrian deaths in the city, making it the number one cause of such fatalities. But officers are apparently appalled by this effort to curb pedestrian deaths because having to produce numbers on such trivialities is going to be "like a nightmare," one cop source told the Post. Can you imagine all the paperwork?
Despite 2014 getting off to a particularly deadly start for pedestrians, cops are apparently sniffing at the crackdown, since jaywalkers and crashes and death are just part of the world we live in, and you can't teach an old jaywalking dog to stay inside the damn crosswalk, as the adage goes. “It’s retarded,” one source reportedly said. “People are going to jaywalk, and when they get stopped, they’re going to get combative." Imagine if this disdain for confronting agitated civilians was pandemic across NYPD history. All of this would be stories about chameleons washing their hands!
“This is going to turn out badly,” he added. “It’s going to be like [former Commissioner] Ray Kelly’s stop-and-frisk.” Wait—when did we start acknowledging that stop-and-frisk turned out badly?
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pedestrian fatalities
pedestrian safety
pedestrians
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Lauren Evans
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