Doug Clark: Fellow jaywalkers, look out for rollercops

I can’t tell you how excited I was to open the newspaper the other day and see that the Spokane Police Department had finally rid the city of crime.

No more dope dealers. No more murderers. No more burglars.

No more East Sprague women of negotiable virtue.

True, the story didn’t say this in exactly these terms.

What it actually said, was:

“Jaywalkers beware. The Spokane Police Department has … dedicated two bike patrol officers to watch for pedestrians who don’t use the crosswalks or who cross intersections without proper signals.”

The way I see it, if the SPD can afford to put two rollercops on jaywalker patrol there must not be any more real criminals worth catching.

I am biased on this topic.

That is because I am one of those jaywalking scofflaws.

Yes, I cross in the middle of streets. I cut across avenues diagonally. Sometimes I’ll just run into the middle of an intersection and entertain traffic by performing some of the wild dance routines from “High School Musical.”

I know what some of you are thinking. So let me state for the record …

WARNING: Jaywalking is dangerous. Jaywalking can kill you. Children should NEVER jaywalk.

Nor should jaywalking ever be considered by the blind, the slow-footed and certain unpopular county commissioners who could easily be considered as targets of opportunity.

Anyone with a basic understanding of the scientific principles such as mass, momentum and inertia will tell you that jaywalking is an idiotic thing to do.

Fortunately for me, I’ve never taken any physics courses. The closest I came was chemistry, for which I received a D-minus. Which means I wouldn’t know the Law of Inertia if it suddenly rolled over me in the form of a Chrysler LeBaron.

But I’m hardly alone.

Downtown Spokane is filled with urban free spirits who are unencumbered by society’s repressive anti-jaywalking laws.

And now, according to the article, we could get a $56 citation per violation.

This is selective law enforcement.

Bloomsday is nothing more than a huge prolonged jaywalk. And I didn’t hear about any citations being handed to Bloomies on Sunday.

Call me a crackpot, but I believe you can measure a city’s vibrancy by its jaywalking population.

The hipper the city, the thicker the jaywalkers.

Take my last trip to the Big Apple. Downtown Manhattan was jumping with jaywalkers.

I mean that literally. The jaywalkers were desperately trying to jump out of the way of the hostile taxi drivers.

Last month I traveled to Istanbul.

Holy hookah! I’ve never seen so many jaywalkers in my life. The streets reminded me of an invasion of army ants, only without as much organization.

I went to the Internet to see where the term “jaywalk” came from.

Someone wrote that “jay” was a slang term derived from the Latin “gaius” for a “countryman by way of mediaeval French.” The idea is that a jaywalker is a rube, too uncultured to fathom something like a traffic law.

Maybe so.

Or the term could date back to the 1960s, when some stoned hippie wandered out into the street while smoking a “jay.”

Who knows?

I can’t explain why I jaywalk.

It’s not as if I ever have anywhere important to go.

But this new police emphasis patrol has me really stressed. Now I have to avoid getting clobbered by a car and a cop on a bike.

Oh, sure, I could always stop jaywalking and start obeying the crosswalk signs.

But like staff meetings and the dress code, I’ve always considered the whole “Walk/Don’t Walk” thing to be optional.