On Thursday afternoon, over a period of approximately 90 minutes between 1:30pm and 3pm, a motorbike-mounted officer for the Santa Monica Police Department pulled over a total of seven vehicles for running through the stop sign placed where Olympic Blvd meets 5th Street, adjacent to the 10 freeway exit.
The stop sign is often missed by drivers or just ignored entirely as they round the corner, adjacent to the Big Blue Bus yards, where gas pumps are located that are used to fuel City municipal vehicles.
The reason that stop sign is there is to prevent an accident with merging traffic exiting the 10 freeway and entering downtown Santa Monica.
The bike cop tasked with this particular duty simply waited for the next vehicle to fail to come to a stop, switched on his lights and sirens, pursued the vehicle for 100 meters or so along 5th Street and before it pulled over just short of the Colorado Avenue intersection.
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The Daily Press got an opportunity to ask Police Chief Ramon Batista about this at the Salvation Army's National Doughnut Day giveaway last Friday.
"We get asked that all the time and I want to just make sure that our residents know that no, our police officers do not have any kind of a traffic quota, arrest quota, stop quota, nothing like that," he said.
"The reason why we were out there is all about traffic safety and to make sure that the motoring public, our pedestrians and bicycle community are being protected, sometimes from one another. And that was really the focus of that operation, it was to raise awareness all the way around, from the person who gets stopped to the passers by that see the officer in the area and spread the word."
scott.snowden@smdp.com
