Cops in Chevy Chase are bored. So they’ve started writing tickets for cars parked in front of people’s homes for the smallest of infractions:

Chevy Chase residents say they are getting more than they bargained for now that the Metropolitan Police Department is providing steady, overnight patrols in their Northwest neighborhood. They say officers are ticketing their vehicles for everything from parking too close to a driveway to having improperly affixed stickers.

[...]

An official in the police department’s 2nd District, which includes Chevy Chase, said officers walk the neighborhood for several hours overnight and must have something to show for their work. When no crimes are being committed and there are no criminals to arrest, he said, ticketing illegally parked cars is productive work.

“They have to show some type of productivity during the night,” Capt. Willie Smith said. “We have anywhere from 30 to 40 officers working all night in the Second District, and there’s two to four in that [area]. If they come in without any tickets, no arrests, no truck stops… they could be challenged by their superiors.”

[...]

The majority of tickets issued in Chevy Chase throughout the early-morning hours last week were for minor infractions and included ones for expired registrations, blocking a driveway and parking too close to an intersection.

At least a dozen residents, who were surprised last week to wake up and find the tickets on their cars, have vented on a community e-mail forum.

Some said they were not aware that they had done something illegal, such as having too many registration stickers on a vehicle window, a violation that carries a $20 fine.

[...]

Mary Myers, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of Public Works, the agency primarily responsible for parking infractions, said city parking laws are not available online. The only way for residents to learn parking rules is to go to a D.C. government office to purchase the related documents or to find them at a public library, she said.

Then again, it’s hard to feel too sorry for Chevy Chase residents when they say things like this:

Officials with the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) 3/4G said residents should not complain to the police department because officers could be reassigned to areas with higher violent-crime rates.

“On the one hand, we can complain about it,” said Cris Fromboluti, a commissioner with ANC 3/4G. “But on the other hand, if we complain that [police officers] are here, maybe they will be taken away. And we don’t want that.”

One, if there are higher-crime areas in need of the officers, they oughtta be sent to the higher-crime areas. The fact that they’re writing pissant tickets for minor violations suggests that may well be the case. But two, why is an armful of arrests and/or citations the measure of how well a police officer performed on his shift? Seems to me that that’s the question residents ought to be demanding city officials answer.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 7:12 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.