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Parking Enforcement Officers Now Assigned by Neighborhood
Photo: California Em/Flickr
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Photo: California Em/Flickr
Starting Monday, LA Department of Transportation parking enforcement will change how they spend their days. Instead of gravitating to areas where it's easy to find violations, therefore write a lot of tickets, they will now be assigned a neighborhood beat. That's a good or bad thing, depending on how you see it. If you tend to park illegally and get away without being ticketed because you live in an area officers don't patrol, those days are probably over. But the good thing, in theory, is that response to chronic problems that degrade neighborhoods--say abandoned vehicles, trucks idling overnight, oversize vehicles--will be more efficiently responded too.
This is all coming out of the department's honest, but slow effort to reach out more to the community. At a recent meeting, residents expressed frustration. They would see parking enforcement on street cleaning days--obviously--but when it came to responding to other problems, it was difficult to solve problems.
"If you spend your whole day going where citations are a guarantee, then you ignore other neighborhoods," explained LADOT spokesman Bruce Gilman over the phone. "It's far better to patrol the same neighborhood and get to know that neighborhood. Hopefully we'll have more presense and we'll be more responsive."
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If someone is parking like an asshole on your street, feel free to tattle. Call LADOT's 24/7 communications centers at 213 485-4184 (use option 2) or 818 752-5100, (use option 2), to speak with an operator can dispatch a traffic officer to respond to the location.
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