An Upper West Side precinct boss blamed pedestrians for a spate of accidents in the area, and said they need to pay better attention to their surroundings to drive down fatalities.
“You see people, they’re not paying attention,” 20th Precinct commanding officer, Capt. Michael Falcon said as he addressed members of the community, according to DNAInfo.com. “They’re looking at their phones.”
“You see people with babies and there’s two seconds [on the countdown clock], and they’re going,” he continued. “It’s mind-boggling the things that people do.”
The precinct — which runs from West 59th Street to West 86th Street, between Central Park West and the Hudson River — had several accidents in January caused by oblivious pedestrians stepping off the curb, according to a sergeant who manages traffic and pedestrian safety at the precinct.
“That’s people running out and being struck. They’re actually standing in intersections,” said Sgt. Felicia Montgomery, according to DNAInfo. “The big push this year is [lowering] pedestrian accidents.”
Community council president Ian Alterman said Falcon and his team stressed to the community that the first step in combating traffic fatalities is educating clueless jaywalkers. As a result, officers in that precinct have begun hanging signs near some of the more heavily trafficked intersections reminding pedestrians to wait for the walk signal and to only cross at crosswalks.
“We have become an overly permissive jaywalking culture,” said Ian Alterman, president of the 20th Precinct community council, referring to the main topic of Monday’s meeting. “People are walking with a green light and paying no attention at all. I think the precinct’s point of view is that pedestrians are the ones who need to step up their game in terms of safety.”
“A lot of people just don’t look before they walk out into traffic,” one police source said. “They’re either looking at their cell phones or they have their head in the clouds… Unfortunately, pedestrians are often the cause of deadly accidents because they simply aren’t aware of their surroundings, and that’s what we’re trying to combat.
The push to reduce the number of traffic deaths comes just weeks after newly appointed police commissioner Bill Bratton announced that pedestrian fatalities will become one of the NYPD’s top priorities amidst the drastic drop in violent crime across the city.
This month alone, three people were killed just blocks past the 20th Precinct’s northern boundary — including a 9-year-old boy and a 73-year-old man.
“Now that they’ve brought the number of homicides down, pedestrian deaths are sticking out like a sore thumb,” Alterman said. “And pedestrians have a large share of the responsibility here.”