I got slapped with a jaywalking ticket

I didn't go into it trying to trap the police in a double standard, but that's how it now looks.

I was walking down 15th Street SE off First Avenue with three people -- two women who wouldn't tell me their names and a man named Marcus Hicks.

They were angry that the cops have been cracking down in southeast Cedar Rapids. They were especially irked that cops were handing out jaywalking tickets for people who walked across residential streets to their car, or their neighbor's house.

We came to the corner of Fifth Avenue SE, and there in the 1400 block of the avenue were three squad cars, and groups of people gathered on porches on both sides of the street. Other than the cops and a toothy, moustached guy with a seven-foot high fence in his small front yard and no less than six growling dogs pacing on the packed dirt behind it, I was the only white guy around.

The woman with me suggested I jaywalk to see if they'd give me a ticket like they did for the black people who'd received tickets earlier. I walked on a diagonal line across the street and a police officer called me over. After a brief exchange with the lieutenant, who was sitting in a squad car to the rear of the others, I was stuck in the back of a squad car for a few minutes and issued a citation for failing to use a crosswalk.

No, I haven't started working for KGAN.

I deliberately jaywalked without thinking too much about it, but then realized as I was halfway across the police had no choice but to give me a ticket. And that's what they did. Partly I didn't believe they were actually citing people for crossing what's essentially a two-lane residential street. (Have we seen any jaywalking tickets issued in Bowman Woods? I bet not.)

Twenty minutes later, the police were gone. As I was talking to some of the young men who'd had their basketball hoop carried away (it was sitting on the city's right-of-way and nobody was claiming it), the same police officer called me and said I could tear up the ticket. Judges have thrown out lots of charges like that, he said, and he shouldn't have issued it to me because I was not "impeding traffic."

That was the difference, he said, between my citation and the other two citations he handed out before I got there.

This of course did not go over well with the crowd in front of 1417 Fifth Ave. SE. They insisted there had been no cars coming when the others received their citations.

One of them was Damita Mims, who said no way, no cars were coming.

The department is now looking into this.