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Several sites claim that there is a strange law in Washington state.

For example: Dumblaws.com claims:

A law to reduce crime states: "It is mandatory for a motorist with criminal intentions to stop at the city limits and telephone the chief of police as he is entering the town."

This law was set up to curb an ever increasing crime rate in the area. Due to its sheer stupidity; however, it is needless to say that the law has affected nothing.

I cannot find any reference to it in the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) or similar.

This seems like it could be one of those laws that's used to increase prison sentences, but I'm not sure. It does seem weird that this is using gendered language, as opposed to most laws which use gender-neutral language.

Was this (or similar) ever enacted into law? Is it still technically in effect?

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    Sounds almost like a creative interpretation of one or more real statutes, filtered through the telephone game. While that site provides the full text of some of the Washington state laws they consider silly, they don't for that one.
    – Dan Getz
    Aug 17, 2015 at 1:19
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    Also, "the area"? "the city limits"? Must be copy-pasted from somewhere which had more context. Looking at Google results, apparently a ton of people have been parroting this information without realizing that "the city" refers to some particular city.
    – Dan Getz
    Aug 17, 2015 at 1:37
  • So far I've found claims that "the town" refers to "a small community" and Tacoma (also here), but no evidence of either.
    – Dan Getz
    Aug 17, 2015 at 1:55
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    Some people should go through the effort to verify/falsify every "law" listed on dumblaws.com once and for all.
    – gerrit
    Aug 17, 2015 at 9:02
  • If such a law would exist you would expect persecutors who want to put every charge they can on a client to use it frequently (and thus create more incentive for the person to agree to a plea bargain). It sounds really implausible that such a law wouldn't be used and thus don't have effects.
    – Christian
    Nov 19, 2018 at 12:42

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