Correcting the record….
In yesterday’s post, I wrote about a staff report that went to council last night (didn’t watch the meeting, no idea what happened). As I mentioned in the post, I spoke with Alameda’s Chief of Police Tibbet to fully understand a couple of the points and in doing so, made a couple of errors in translation that I want clear up.
I’m going to begin with a revised footnote from yesterday, which is saying that not only to I appreciate the work that APD does, and that they do in fact care deeply about pedestrian and bicycle safety issues (there was a feeling be some in the PD that my point was that the police don’t care about cyclists, this is not at all the case). More specifically to the Alameda Theater, as a frequent visitor over the summer, I can personally attest to the regular presence of officers in and around the theater during the time that the staff report was written and had not meant to imply that APD did no enforcement whatsoever during the theaters first months. If that was implied, I apologize.
I wrote:
The response from the City Manager’s office is that “a lot of things were studied” which I don’t doubt, but the more I hear, the more unclear I become on what was actually done. According to the Chief, no person was out on the street watching conditions, and officers were not assigned to enforce that intersection.
I had meant that the Chief had indicated that while he wishes he had the staff to go stand at the corner and look at conditions for hours on end and then write a report, he did not, and therefore, with regards to the reporting back, nobody had. The second part of the sentence is just a glaring misunderstanding on my part. Chief Tibbet had said that he didn’t have the manpower to station someone at the corner of Oak and Central, meaning 24-hours a day, what I heard and wrote did not accurately reflect that. Wanted to clear that up, officers were at that intersection throughout the reporting time period enforcing a multitude of traffic laws, there should be no question on that issue.
In talking about the staff’s report on enforcement efforts, I wrote:
I’m not clear on who wrote this, despite the Chief’s signature. In a conversation with the Chief yesterday, he indicated that it was not written accurately.
Two things here, first, the Chief’s point in our initial conversation was that writing a brief description of “discretionary enforcement” is difficult if not impossible given all the nuance of the subject and that it is not the position of the APD that they only cite or warn people when someone is endangered. The chief and I disagree on what was written in the staff report, as I mentioned yesterday, Given my interpretation of the staff report, I believe that means that what is written there is inaccurate. The Chief has a broader view of its meaning and had meant to say it could be fleshed out more, but would stop short of saying it’s inaccurate.
I believe the sentence is pretty clear and not open to a lot of interpretation:
…traffic enforcement is discretionary in nature, and minor violations that do not result in safety concerns are either handled with a warning or citation. In the situations where a vehicle crosses a bicycle lane and a bicyclist’s travel is impeded, enforcement action would be taken, and the driver may be cited.
I read this to explain when this specific violation of the vehicle code will be enforced. My comment from the Chief yesterday was to say that this is not APD’s position, that the sentence is too restrictive in it’s writing (or I am being too restrictive in my reading of it). I had been trying to indicate that the report may not be fully presenting the spectrum of options and appeared to be presenting a too narrow prescription for enforcement.
Lastly, and this brings it back full circle to my statement above
However, the end result is the same, no enforcement (including verbal warnings). So see, it doesn’t matter that this enforcement was a part of the council’s motion, or a part of the proposal that was presented to the council. All traffic enforcement is discretionary, so I’m not clear on the point. We enforce a lot of safety laws when the action is not immediately threatening another person (think red light running late at night, speeding on an empty street, etc).
The idea that you would only enforce (verbal or citation) the law if you see it directly affecting someone is troublesome. The case being made here (again, I’m not sure it’s the Police’s case) is that there is no role for prevention in Alameda’s law enforcement, at least in cases of bicycle safety.
My suggestion here was that if, as I believe the staff report says, these violations are only ticketed when someone is actually almost hit, then the logic of the report (“the case being made here”) is that we are not doing preventative enforcement in this instance.
Further, in a discussion with another senior city official on the issue (prior to my original discussion with the Chief of Police) I was told that comparing preventative red-light running violations to preventative bike lane violations was blowing things out of proportion and destroying my argument. Not a comment that says: “bike safety is equally important to other kinds of safety” during a discussion about unsafe behaviors that directly affect the safety of bicyclists. This was not a comment from APD.
Obviously APD does a lot of preventative enforcement from Pedestrian right of way enforcement, to red light running, DUIs and many others. It’s what made this comment in the report to the council jump out.
Lastly, the APD has said that their reported citations do not include any tickets for violating the bike lane, however, these citations would not include verbal warnings. Apparently, when asked about citations and verbal warnings that were given (answer “none”) the response was specific to the record, and doesn’t reflect the possibility that an offices gave a verbal warning for the behavior, because verbal warnings are not recorded. (the answer was in relation to the written report record, whether this issue was actually enforced with verbal warnings is unknown).
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m still unclear on who wrote the staff report, but given my quoting of the Chief in my post, I probably should have been clearer that I wasn’t suggesting he, or his department, had signed on to this idea specifically.
Of course this all comes down to prioritizing issues, and clearly not every vehicle infraction can be cited or warned. But given that there were concerns that were raised early and often about Central and Oak and bicyce safety, the fact that there is nothing in two staff reports about the state of bicycle safety or access to the streets in that area (parking yes, street safety no) was disappointing to say the least.
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