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Health & Fitness

To Protect? To Serve? To Raise Money?

The police have a tough job, granted, fortunately we live in a pretty safe city, but what bothers me is when they endanger public safety in the name of writing a ticket so they can raise revenues.  These 3 pictures illustrate something that I see all the time around town, I've spoken to Lt. Schmutz about it and he agreed it was wrong and said he'd talk to the deputies about it, but the behavior doesn't seem to have changed.  So to address just these 3 examples:

The motorcop sitting and blocking the exit part of the driveway at the Canada park along Antonio Pkwy.  The speed limit on here is 55, so he is try to write tickets.  Anyone turning in to the park will be going fairly fast.  The cop is blocking the exit lane, so you are forced to go around in to the entrance lane thus setting yourself up for a head on collision very easily.  He is doing this only to raise money by writing tickets with a total disregard to the safety of the people coming and going to the park.

In the ticket writing picture, I was driving down that hill, the officer is about 4 feet from the curb, had his door open at the time and was standing in the middle (at the painted line) of the street, this was to write a ticket.  I was coming down and a guy made a right turn and had to suddenly swing wide because of the unexpected blockage of the lane and I had to slam on my brakes to avoid a head on collision.  There was no reason the officer couldn't have taken him up to the parking lot 30 feet away and safely write the ticket.  This was about 8am on a school day when there is extremely high traffic along here at Banderas and Altazano.

the final picture at Arroyo Vista park is the most troublesome.  The officer has positioned himeself so he is not visible but can radar gun people going too fast.  The problem is he is blocking the entrance to the park, and there is an enormous amount of foot traffic through this drive way because the design of the park is so bad, there is no convenient and safe way to exit the park.  So you have kids walking out, a car comes to turn in, has to suddenly swing wide because the drive way is blocked and you have a dead kid.  It shocks me no one has been killed yet.  I approached the officer  about his unsafe position and suggested one further down where he wouldn't be making it unsafe, he said what he was doing was fine and it wasn't my business.  Well, yes it is, my daughter walks through there twice a day and so did all her friends.  His problem in parking in a safe spot was that he'd then be visible and people would slow down and he wouldn't get to write the ticket.  Now isn't the point for people to drive the speed limit?  If his presence gets that result, then why does he need to write a ticket?  Maybe we need less deputies if they have so little to do that their focus is revenue generation.  I'd much prefer a cooperative relationship with the police than the adversarial one that we seem to have every time I try to talk to them.  I won't even get in to the fact that kids at the skate park are getting tickets with 50 hours community service for not wearing a helmet when kids selling drugs at the schools are getting 12 hours.

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