On my office wall hangs a poster, “Murphy’s Laws of Combat,” a list of items that most veterans (and many non-veterans) are familiar with. This poster has graced a wall near my desk in every office I have inhabited since I was a young Second Lieutenant. While these laws are many and varied, one of Murphy’s bits of wisdom has broad application in all manner of human endeavor: “If it’s stupid but works, it’s not stupid.”
Which brings us, unsurprisingly, to San Francisco. That city has among its myriad problems an issue of drivers speeding through marked crosswalks. To educate these crosswalk scofflaws about the presence of the walkways, San Francisco police officers are dressing up as chickens.
Yes, really.
The San Francisco Police Department is dressing up in inflatable chicken costumes to catch drivers speeding past crosswalks in a new stunt.
SFGate reported Monday on San Francisco police Lt. Jonathan Ozol wearing the costume while walking down a crosswalk on Alemany Boulevard near the intersection of Rousseau Street. The idea, Capt. Amy Hurwitz explained, is for drivers to take notice and yield to pedestrians.
Unfortunately, some drivers still aren’t yielding to Ozol.
“I don’t want them to get run over,” Hurwitz said. “But the costume is so bright, it’s like, how can you miss it?”
Never underestimate the human ability to overlook the obvious. This isn’t the first, similar effort the San Francisco Police Department has tried to address the crosswalk problem:
Monday’s exercise was the fifth one conducted over the last six months. Each featured an officer crossing different intersections dressed in a different costume, sometimes as a unicorn or Big Bird.
Hurwitz said each exercise has resulted in approximately 30 to 40 citations each with fines costing up to $400. Ozol similarly expressed disappointment at the high number.
“If you don’t see someone in a giant chicken costume, then we really have a problem,” he said.
It’s hard to disagree with that last statement. I mean, someone dressed as a giant chicken isn’t something one sees every day; although bear in mind, this is San Francisco, where all kinds of weirdness are not only tolerated but celebrated. We know that there is such a thing as “furries,” people who are… titillated by dressing up as various furry animals. Is the San Francisco Police Department unwittingly starting up the next such fad? What will the people who dress up as birds be called? Featheries?
Amazingly, the fowl tactic seems to be working:
“It’s having an impact,” Ozol said. “Drivers seem more aware, more cognizant. Certainly when they see the chicken.”
Well, there you are. It turns out that a giant chicken in a crosswalk actually does draw the attention of drivers. If it’s stupid but works, it’s not stupid!
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Think, now, about the possible new avenues for this tactic. Perhaps state legislators could dress up as skunks, in the interest of truth in advertising. Teachers could dress up as parrots. City and state bureaucrats may want to dress up as moles – or sloths.
California is an odd place in many ways, and even for California, San Francisco seems to be the oddest of the odd. It’s difficult to imagine, in any other major city, a police officer dressing up as a chicken, a unicorn, or Big Bird for any reason other than, perhaps, a county fair fundraising stunt. But to catch crosswalk scofflaws? That’s a new one.
