Sockless Cabbie Thinks Ticket Stinks Seems Sandals, Bare Feet Violate Washington Taxi Decorum

William E. Nixon thinks the Washington police department may be getting carried away with its “zero tolerance” policy toward crime.

Nixon, a Washington cabdriver for 12 years, was parked outside the Washington Court Hotel on New Jersey Avenue N.W. one recent Sunday, reading a newspaper.

It was a warm day, and he was dressed casually: slacks, shirt, sandals.

As Nixon sat reading, Officer Wanda Harris approached his cab and stuck her head through an open window. “Hi,” Nixon recalled her saying.

He said the officer glanced down and noticed his toes peeking out of his sandals.

“You don’t have any socks on,” he remembered Harris saying.

The officer immediately put pen to paper and wrote him a $25 ticket.

“Improper dress,” the citation read. “No socks on - feet out.”

Nixon is 71, with wavy white hair and a booming voice.

“What’s the point of wearing sandals if you have to wear socks?” he asked, dumbfounded. “It’s ridiculous.”

But he accepted the ticket without much fuss, and Harris bid him good day.

“I should have thrown a rock at her,” Nixon said this week, joking in an interview in his Northwest Washington home. Once again, he had on sandals.

Harris, who is assigned to the department’s sex-offense unit but was working overtime as a cab inspector, said she had no sympathy for Nixon.

“He knows that he has to wear socks with his sandals,” she said. “It’s a violation not to. He has the (rule) book; he knows the law.”

She added matter-of-factly: “If I break the law, I have to deal with the consequences. If my grandfather breaks the law, he has to deal with the consequences.”

Nixon acknowledged that there is a long-standing rule in the manual for cabbies that forbids the wearing of sandals without socks.

“That’s an archaic regulation,” he said. “I don’t know who in the hell put that in there. I guess somebody thought that a fungi would jump off a cabdriver’s foot.

“I didn’t think my feet were that bad looking,” he added. “Hell, they’re not great, but they’re functional.”