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Friday, December 08, 2006

And another thing . . .

On the subject of wasting public resources, Seattle is apparently going to be hiring some additional police officers. And yet I often see police officers doing things like directing traffic in construction zones and at the exits from downtown parking garages during rush hour. Don't even get me started on parking enforcement. Are these really jobs that need to be performed by actual police officers? Is this written into a union contract or something? To me it would make sense to deploy police personnel only for those tasks that, for lack of a better term, I'm going to call "actual police work." Directing traffic could fall to some less expensive type of city workers. It doesn't take a fully-trained police officer to do stuff like that.


posted at 12:17 AM

2 Comments:

Blogger tp_gal said...

I hate to be contrary, but I believe that the parking type police personnel are not fully commissioned officers, as I don't believe they complete the entire police academy curriculum. It is also my belief that the officers directing traffic outside construction sites and outside our big buildings garages on a nightly basis are paid for by the construction site management and the building management. This is not a 'free' service that the city of Seattle offers.

This is apparent when traffic on hwy 99 or 1-5 backs up into the city and police managed traffic direction is nowhere to be found.

When I was a true resident of the city, I wrote and asked why they couldn't deploy a parking type officer to keep order when it is needed. The closure of the Aurora Bridge for example, creates havoc in the Ballard, Wallingford, Fremont and Westlake neighborhoods. The reply was far from satisfactory and (I'm paraphrasing) went something like this:
We can't pull valuable resources from other areas because what if those other neighborhoods need assistance.

I do feel comfort that as I'm sitting in a traffic jam the size of Manhattan that people on Capital Hill are still getting parking tickets.

(i like the word verification, but it frustraites me when I can't read the font... is it a d or is it a cl? &^%%& it was a cl.)

December 09, 2006 10:44 AM  
Blogger MWR said...

I hope that all of what you say is true. I was talking about public road construction zones. I recently saw about three seemingly full-fledged officers sharing the duties at an intersection where some construction was going on.

December 10, 2006 12:27 AM  

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