http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...0/MN148388.DTL
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(07-20) 04:00 PDT San Francisco -- For some people, it would be a mere annoyance: a $75 jaywalking ticket.
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But for Robert Weidman, it became a three-year crusade, which ended only when he got the city of San Francisco to give in and admit that its police officers didn't know the state's jaywalking code.
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Weidman's war began on May 25, 1998, when two San Francisco officers stopped the 34-year-old fund-raising consultant as he was walking alongside his car on Albion Street in the Mission District.
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Weidman would say later that the officers manhandled and frisked him for no reason before presenting him with the final insult: a $75 jaywalking ticket.
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At the time, Weidman demanded that the officers explain themselves. "You want to know why I'm doing this? Because I can, that's why I'm doing this," one of the officers reportedly said.
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Weidman was angry and decided to fight back. "I never did anything that could be remotely construed as jaywalking, let alone violating the law," Weidman said.
Weidman, who has since moved to New York and works to help raise money for nonprofit organizations, first fought the jaywalking ticket in San Francisco court and won a dismissal.
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Then he took the city to court, saying that its officers were abusing the state law against jaywalking. That was in 1999. It wasn't until Wednesday, when the city's Police Commission signed off on a settlement, that Weidman could claim victory.
"It has been a long road to try to get at least some sense of accountability from the Police Department," he said yesterday.
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Although he won, Weidman won't get rich off the settlement. His attorney will get most of the $27,500 agreement.
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Weidman's attorney, for his part, spent three years fighting the city over the proposition that Weidman's jaywalking ticket was invalid.
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Weidman was not even jaywalking in the first place, the suit said, just legally walking past his own parked car to get off the one-lane, one-way street.
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Even if he had been crossing the street at the time, the police improperly used the state law against jaywalking, according to the suit. To be guilty under the state vehicle code section 21955, a jaywalker must illegally cross a street governed by "traffic control signal devices." Case law dating to 1940 dictates that stop signs do not fall under that category.
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Matthew Witteman, Weidman's attorney, charged the San Francisco Police Department with engaging in a pattern and practice of citing pedestrians for jaywalking on streets governed by stop signs in clear violation of the state code.
"It was a violation of his rights, that's what the constitution is all about -- cops can't do this kind of stuff," Witteman said. "Some people may think it amounts to small potatoes, but every one of these things counts."
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Under what Witteman called an "absurd" police interpretation, every person who crosses a residential street in the city is guilty of jaywalking, subject to arrest.
There is a San Francisco municipal code dealing with jaywalking on streets governed by stop signs, but enforcement is restricted to commercial districts, he said.
Witteman, a former cab driver, used his knowledge of the city's streets and a map designating traffic lights to find at least 45 citations on stop-sign controlled streets issued between 1998 to 2000. Those 45 people were notified that they had become part of a class-action suit to stop the practice.
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He said the tickets focused on high-crime areas near Capp Street in the Mission and the Haight-Ashbury area. The city denied any pattern of improper conduct, but in the end admitted that it did not train its officers to adhere to the state's jaywalking law.
"It's a fair settlement for the city and the plaintiffs," said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for the city attorney's office.
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The settlement must now be reviewed by the Board of Supervisors. It dictates that police will no longer use the state law to cite jaywalkers on streets governed by stop signs and requires the Police Department to retrain its officers about the code and issue a bulletin.
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As for the 45 people Witteman found who were stuck with similar tickets, under the limitations of the legal settlement they may have to be content with the city's promise not to do this again.
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Those who paid the $75 ticket under similar circumstances are unlikely to be compensated.
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That's because offenders already had a chance to challenge the tickets in court and chose to pay the fine instead. Also, U.S. District Court Judge Thelton Henderson Jr. limited any monetary damages to Weidman alone.
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"There's nothing more that can be done," Weidman said about what happened. "But this is what I feel is a reasonable way to get justice for what was done to me."
E-mail Jaxon Van Derbeken at jvanderbeken@...
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