Jaywalking in downtown D.C. (Photo: Jay Westcott)

Sometimes Washington pedestrians need to be saved from themselves.

That’s what patrol officers with the Metropolitan Police Department believe these days. During the last few weeks, a handful of spots around town known for heavy foot traffic have apparently been targeted for jaywalking enforcement. Some of the cops’ favorite corners: 14th and R streets NW, by the Whitman Walker Clinic; New Jersey Avenue and M Street SE, at the Navy Yard Metro; and 7th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue SE, near Eastern Market. Annoyed witnesses have taken to Twitter to bemoan a citation or give fellow travelers a heads up.

According to Third District Cmdr. Jacob Kishter, whatever tickets were being doled out on 14th Street haven’t been part of some District-wide or citywide campaign, as far as he knows.

“We haven’t conducted any enforcement north of [New York] Ave.,” he writes in an e-mail.

Marissa Payne, who blogs as the Anti-D.C., tells us she was popped for a $20 violation on July 26 for starting to walk across 14th Street while the orange hand was flashing with a few seconds left — a situation, she learned, that counts as a jaywalk.

She doesn’t think it was a random stop. “They were stopping anyone and everyone,” Payne writes in an e-mail. “The experience seemed like a total racket.” Along with her ticket Payne got a pamphlet on pedestrian safety and a brief lecture from the cop on how people are getting killed crossing streets illegally in the District. "The two others that got stopped before and after me both didn't speak English," she says.

The tandems of cops have been writing tickets mostly during morning and afternoon rush hours, probably for less than an hour at a time. (In two cases, the officers were already gone by the time On Foot made it to the scene.)

In a city that still logs 140-odd homicides a year, nailing commuters for walking on red strikes plenty of people as a waste of resources. But at least in the case of the Navy Yard, some aggressive traffic control makes plenty of sense. Last week a woman suffered critical injuries when she was struck by a dump truck turning at 1st and M streets SE. According to Neal Augenstein at WTOP, the operator of the truck kept going until other drivers alerted him that he'd hit someone. Police spokesman Lt. Nicholas Breul said the woman was apparently within the crosswalk when she was hit.

Police officers had been handing out warnings and citations for jaywalking near that corner the day before the accident, which was the second of its kind this year on that stretch. Back in April, 42-year-old Amy Polk, of Takoma Park, Md., was hit by an auto and killed less than a block from the Metro entrance. According to MPD’s initial report, Polk apparently wasn’t in a crosswalk and the driver was not cited.

“Next thing you knew,” says Andre Tobe, a Capitol Riverfront employee who greets people at the top of the escalator, “we had crossing guards here.”

As for the citations at that spot on a recent morning, “It looked like they were giving out more warnings than tickets. One dude walked out and [the cop] just called him back and explained why he couldn’t cross.” Although M Street is posted 25 miles per hour here, its six lanes give it the feel of a highway and cars act accordingly.

“It’s a major road and the cars go fast,” says Tobe, adding that a lot of pedestrians do jaywalk at the intersection. “They’re just not following the safety rules.”

Some pedestrian ticketing at a hairy spot like this one strikes us as pretty reasonable. We do, however, wonder how effective such ticketing could possibly be as a deterrent. The citation for jaywalking comes with a relatively small fine and almost zero shame, unlike, say, reckless driving, or urinating in public. In that sense, jaywalking tickets are probably a lot like parking tickets.

A lot of us would rather run a modest risk than wait it out.

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Been busted walking on red in D.C.? Drop us a line at TBDOnFoot@gmail.com.