The large furry rabbit walking between Central and Garfield avenues Wednesday was no hallucination, especially for drivers who failed to yield.
For an hour and a half, Glendale Police Officer Tom Broadway donned the eye-catching costume during an enforcement sting aimed at educating motorists to yield for pedestrians walking along unmarked crosswalks.
Police cited 24 motorists on suspicion of failing to yield to Broadway as he walked across Central.
But now a local politician, sucking up to car drivers as opportunistic and unprincipled politicians always do, has protested about this policing strategy, provoking this defence of it:
Many times the motorists say they never saw a pedestrian, or there was no pedestrian in the crosswalk. If a motorist can’t see a 6-foot-tall Easter Bunny or Santa in the crosswalk, they surely won’t see a frail senior citizen crossing.
Some think this is entrapment, but it is not. If a pedestrian is legally crossing in the crosswalk, whether it be a citizen, plain-clothed police officer or Easter Bunny, the motorist alone makes the choice to violate the law and not yield the right-of-way, as required.
