DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997                TAG: 9704180804

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS

                                            LENGTH:   68 lines

RED LIGHT RUNNERS: MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU

For months, the sun-baked crew at City Hall down in Virginia Beach has been doing its best to earn the town a new motto: ``Land of Distorted Realities.''

The Parrotheads want an amphitheater so Jimmy Buffett will come by once a year to sing a couple of choruses of beer-swill rock? No problem.

Need a PGA golf course so the boys-in-plaid will have a better grade of fescue to frolic in? Gotcha covered.

Need some cash for the schools so little Johnny won't have to study Beowulf in a sweaty double-wide parked on the asphalt out behind the real school? Hey

The latest classic, though, is the city's response to an ODU professor's research, published in the paper Wednesday, that proves something most of us have known for years: Virginia Beach is the red-light-running capital of Western civilization.

You might think a half-savvy city government would hustle a couple of cops out to write some very visible rush-hour tickets at the worst intersections.

Think again. The next day, Virginia Beach shifted a horde of traffic-enforcement folks down to the Oceanfront, where they'll spend the next few months patrolling on bicycles to ensure that no tourists from Michigan are endangered by errant Frisbees on the beach, or that nobody commits felony bikini-droop.

Meanwhile, just blocks away on Laskin Road, a maniac can wheel two tons of angry pickup truck at 50 mph across six lanes of traffic, against the light, and his odds of getting caught are approximately the same as the odds of tripping over Jimmy Hoffa's corpse working up a tan down by the Boardwalk.

If he does get caught, the fine is $50 and costs. You get the very same fine for fishing without a license. Which, do you suppose, causes more fatalities?

A source in the Police Department said the shifting of officers to the Oceanfront for tourist season pretty much shuts down traffic enforcement, ``except for the guys who handle DUIs and fatalities, and they mostly work at night.''

Which means, unless you're dead drunk, or just plain dead, whatever you do on the streets is not likely to attract a lot of attention.

Do we have a problem here? Yes. Last year, Richmond and its suburbs faced the same problem. They cracked down. The city and county police wrote 2,333 red-light tickets in three months.

The result? In the 'burbs, accidents attributed to red-light-runners were cut by 50 percent. In the city, overall accidents for the year dropped 28 percent.

A Beach police spokesman told me, ``That's all well and good if you can afford to put a cop at every intersection.''

Well, we can't afford that, but we can afford to make better use of the cops we have. The rank-and-file Beach police are a fairly tough and effective force. They respond very well to leadership.

So here's a modest proposal: Let's lead a few of them to some of the really wicked intersections - say, Laskin at First Colonial, or Independence at the Boulevard - during the hours of 7-9 a.m. and 4-6 p.m., which is pretty much low-crime sleepy time at the beachfront anyway.

Let 'em chase down the red-light-runners, and, while we're at it, let's jack up the penalty to at least $100. Then, earmark the proceeds for the school system, so maybe we can get little Johnny an early parole from his tin-can classroom and into a chair in an actual building.

As a result, a few more citizens might live just a bit longer and likely be grateful for it. And others of us might be able to venture onto the streets without having to slam down a handful of Valium once we get home.

If we get home. MEMO: Dave Addis is the editor of Commentary. Reach him at 446-2726, or

addis(AT)worldnet.att.net.

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