Police in the southwest Ohio city of Oxford say they will start training civilian residents to write parking tickets.Sergeant Jim Squance says residents will have to complete a nine-week Citizens Police Academy as well as additional training in parking enforcement. He says volunteers only will write tickets for residential violations, such as blocking a driveway.
Squance says although more people will be writing tickets, he doesn’t expect an overall increase in the number of tickets issued. He says if there’s a problem with overzealous ticket writers, it will be stopped quickly.
First, the obvious: Sgt. Jim, does it really take nine weeks to learn how to spot a residential parking violation and write the ticket? Or will it take that much time to indoctrinate instruct the trainees to use your arcane logic: that an increase in ticket writers won’t produce an increase in the number of tickets written? If you don’t expect an increase in the number of violations spotted (and the resulting increase in revenue) then how can you justify the time and expense the town will incur? Or perhaps crime has risen so much that officers must be freed from enforcing parking regulations so they can concentrate on enforcing other laws.
Oxford is a lovely little town; a large percentage (if not a majority) of residents are students at Miami. There’s no doubt that students are a bit more casual about parking than they might be in, say, downtown Cincinnati. My own observations, made over four multi-day trips there since last July, is that they do occasionally park on the lawns of the houses they rent, but mainly because there appears to be insufficient parking for those houses (perhaps due to inadequate zoning regulations in Oxford).
I have to wonder if this is the non-university population putting the pressure on. If so, I’d have to ask why. The town thrives because of the university, not in spite of it.
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