An unknown number of parking tickets written in late March were dispensed by an unauthorized person, an administrator with the Department of Parking, Transportation, and Auxiliary Services said this week.
The official noted that the normal parking enforcement specialist was likely unavailable, so a graduate student was mistakenly dispatched by a parking employee to write tickets. The official did not name the employee responsible for the mistake. Students employed by the parking office are not authorized to write tickets under any circumstances.
The roles of Parking work study students were changed in November. Prior to that, undergraduate students under the employ of the Parking office were allowed to write tickets—not graduate students, however. Since then, students working for the office are primarily tasked with clerical work.
The improper issuance was an isolated incident, and has since been corrected, the official said. Jim Shanley ’07, a civil engineering major, believes that he is one of the affected students. After coming out of the Commons, he saw a non-uniformed person near his car. “I saw this guy walking around my car and to me it looked like he was looking in it. I didn’t know what he was doing,” Shanley said.
“He kept going around the car, no uniform on, no badge displayed. I didn’t know who he was. Luckily, I noticed him write out the ticket, so I figured it was an off-duty officer. I also saw tickets on other people’s cars. I realized he was probably not trying to steal anything from the car, he was probably just writing tickets.”
Shanley, who has received tickets in the past, thought the person could have been writing fake tickets as a prank. When the person did not identify himself, “I asked if he was with public safety, or for a badge number, or any type of identification. He wouldn’t give me anything. He kept walking away and doing his own thing.” Shanley went to the main desk in the parking office.“They just said it was a grad student working for them,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell me his name. They said they knew exactly who it was, and that he was working for them.”
There is a process in place for appealing tickets. A parking review board, consisting of students, reviews the case and either grants or denies the appeal. Students are generally granted one appeal per year, and most first-time offenses are granted the appeal as well. If the offense occurred in a life-safety situation, however, such as parking in a handicapped zone or a fire lane, the appeal will generally be denied.
The official did not speculate on the likelihood of an appeal being granted in the judicial proceedings of these improperly written cases. Presenting the ticket to the board for further review, however, would be the correct course of action if a particular student believes a ticket he received was unauthorized.“The tickets weren’t written in error. The students still had parked where they should not have been,” said the official.
