FlamingText

True Crime Tales from the Mean Streets of Seattle

It's a wonder I'm alive today, to hear Officer Bob #8737 of the Seattle Police Department tell it.

  Let me explain. Seattle readers may know that, due to construction of light rail taking place in the bus tunnels that run beneath our fair city, 3rd Avenue has been closed to all automobile traffic and will remain so for the next two years. This is happening because back in the eighties when the city planners were exercising some rarely-evidenced foresight by laying track in the bus tunnels, track that was explicitly designed to accommodate some future light rail system, they laid the wrong kind. So now that it looks like some form of limited and poorly-thought-out mass transit will finally get built in spite of the best efforts of Seattle's civic leaders to put the kibosh on every single plan to build same that has ever been put forward by anybody (goodbye, monorail!), there will be a two year delay while untold millions are being spent to tear up the existing track and replace it with some track that is actually functional, unlike the old track which was merely festive.

  This puts all the buses that used to run through this tunnel under downtown back up on the surface streets, which is why 3rd Avenue is now a bus-only thoroughfare. Starting this week. Which is why this week there is a representative of Seattle's Finest positioned roughly every 15 feet along 3rd Avenue, standing at the ready to pull over any motorists that may not have gotten the memo and slap them with a hefty fine. Which is also why, at approximately 7:55 this morning, after exiting the #49 bus that had just let me off at the intersection of Pine St and 3rd Ave downtown, I crossed at the crosswalk and was subsequently ordered by Officer Bob #8737 to halt and remain in a halted position whilst he wrote me out a $46.00 ticket for disregarding a Don't Walk signal.

  Because, although the light was clearly green when I crossed, there was quite plainly a SOLID red hand displayed in the little pedestrian sign. Had it been a BLINKING red hand, that would have been another matter. But it was a SOLID red hand, and that, my friends, makes all the difference. I guess that I must not have been paying much attention to whether the hand was solid or blinking because I had already determined that the light was green and, more importantly, a visual check told me that no cars or buses were bearing down on me with potentially fatal consequence. In spite of the fact that I was not really endangering myself or others or in fact slowing traffic in any way, I was informed by THE MAN (i.e. Officer Bob #8737 ) that the light is "for cars" only, even though there are of course no cars allowed on 3rd Avenue any more.

  Now, I have been crossing streets my entire life and like to think I'm pretty good at it. I mean, I've gotten this far without being struck by any moving vehicles (knock wood) and have even managed to avoid being struck by drivers who were themselves ignoring a red light by employing this time-honored practice of checking for oncoming cars before venturing out into the street. I should add that this is substantially better than my record behind the wheel of a vehicle, where I have been struck by vehicles that ran red lights. On the most recent occasion where this occurred one of my passengers (the lovely sonya) received a concussion that required a trip to the emergency room, and I lost a perfectly good vehicle (well, okay it was a hatchback, but still.)

  This incident took place directly in front of a police station, the shiny new metal cop fortress that was built soon after the WTO "riots" took place (*cough*) and included numerous riot-ready features such as high ramparts with elevated metal walkways where officers with rifles could presumably be situated, bulletproof windows and, most significantly, a phalanx of outward-facing video cameras poised to record anything and everything that happened within a block of the place. This is an important detail because when my car was T-boned by the other car running a red light, thus totalling both cars and knocking Sonya's head into the rear passenger side window, not only did no police officers come out of the building to investigate the rather loud crash that had just occurred (I guess bulletproof glass is a really effective sound-dampener), but when the other driver abandoned his vehicle and fled on foot a minute after I had walked across the street to get help, no officers were available to chase him down, and apparently after the fact it never occurred to anybody to rewind one of the tapes that those video cameras are recording twenty-four hours a day so as to get a good look at the guy. In fact, the entire case was dropped a year later for lack of evidence. To my knowledge, nobody was ever charged, including the owner of the abandoned vehicle, who hadn't by the way listed it as stolen, and I was basically out one car. Sonya, thankfully, recovered from her injuries after a rough week or two, and went on to become even more awesome than she had previously been.

  So, like I said, I thought that my pedestrian skills were pretty finely honed, as evidenced by my aforementioned perfect record of more than three death-free decades in which I was neither killed nor caused anyone else to be killed as a result of my pedestrianism. But obviously my faith in my own street-crossing abilities was woefully misguided, and so I now must pay for that mistake to the tune of $46.00 American, which is really a small price to pay for a valuable lesson that might one day save my life. I realize now that the solid red hand is not to be trifled with. The solid red hand must be respected; above all the solid red hand must be obeyed.

  So, here's my question: What is up with those mustaches? How come the only people I ever see sporting them are cops and middle-aged gay men? I've been racking my brains for years trying to come up with the connection and all I've been able to come up with is that one guy in the Village People.

"Be safe, now." says Officer Bob #8737.

Posted by flamingbanjo at September 28, 2005 11:32 AM