Editorial: Protecting pedestrians is tough duty

Friday, Aug. 26, 2005 | 9:02 a.m.

North Las Vegas Police Sgt. Randy Carter took on a highly dangerous assignment earlier this week -- he agreed to claim his right of way as a pedestrian in a crosswalk. At one point, he said, he got trapped when more than 20 cars going in both directions whizzed through a crosswalk while he was in the middle. "Nobody stopped on that one," he told Las Vegas Sun reporter David Kihara.

His assignment was part of a three-month operation by the North Las Vegas Police Department that began in June. Assisted by a $20,000 state grant that expires next month, the police department is deploying officers wearing regular clothing at intersections -- and motorcycle officers at a discreet distance. Their instructions are to use the crosswalks and cite motorists who fail to yield the right of way. On Tuesday, at a crosswalk on Lake Mead Boulevard, Carter and the motorcycle officers could not keep up with the volume of offenders. In this typical case, the officers cite only the most blatant offenders. So far, more than 260 tickets have been written.

Some of the stopped drivers complained that the police officers were out simply to make money for the city. With each ticket costing a driver $190, we can understand why they felt that way. But the program wasn't about the money. It was about pedestrian safety -- an area in which the Las Vegas Valley performs miserably. In June of last year this newspaper published a series of articles on the growing number of pedestrian deaths in our area, and found that pedestrians here are at considerably more risk than in most parts of the country. Our work was backed up in December, when a national organization, the Surface Transportation Safety Project, compiled a list of the 50 most dangerous "large metro areas" (more than 1 million in population) in the nation for pedestrians. The Las Vegas area was ranked 11th.

In our view, the North Las Vegas Police Department is performing a valuable public service in catching drivers who either don't know or don't care that pedestrians always have the right of way in crosswalks. Pedestrians sometimes bring on their own deaths or injuries by jaywalking into heavy traffic. But we've had far too many people here killed while simply using a crosswalk and believing they were safe. We would support budgeting grant money for police officers to conduct such operations year-round.

With school starting Monday, meaning tens of thousands of children will be walking to and from school, it's a matter of life and death for drivers to understand and obey the rules about crosswalks, as well as speed zones. Far more than a ticket is at stake.