Taking shade during peak hour traffic
October 23, 2013, By KNews, Filed Under Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source
There is an interesting story about a driver who was once stopped by one of our zealous traffic ranks.
A driver was speeding in a 35 mile per hour zone when a local police officer pulled her over and walked up to the car. The officer also happened to be female and she asked for the driver’s licence.
The driver searched frantically in her purse for a while and finally said to the policewoman, “What does a driver’s licence look like?”
Irritated, the cop said, “You dummy, it’s got your picture on it!”
The driver frantically searched her purse again and found a small, rectangular mirror down at the bottom. She held it up to her face and said, “Aha! This must be my driver’s licence” and handed it to the policewoman.
The cop looked in the mirror, handed it back to the driver and said, “You’re free to go. And, if I had known you were a police officer too, we could have avoided all of this.”
There are a great many infractions committed each day by ranks of the Guyana Police Force. At times, it seems as if once someone is assigned to drive a police vehicle, then that person does not have to comply with the law.
There is hardly a known case of a cop pulling over another cop to charge that person for violating a traffic law. And yet each day there are countless cases of persons in police uniforms violating the laws.
Sometimes, they run traffic lights. They do this with impunity because they know that they are not likely to be pulled over by their own colleagues and also because they can always claim that they were on an exercise and thus this justified them running the traffic signals.
Yesterday during peak hours, a traffic rank was assigned duties at a certain location in the city. The rank arrived there on a motorcycle. It was during peak hours and the traffic was all congested at the junction. Yet the rank made no effort whatsoever when he arrived to try to ease the situation by moving quickly to direct traffic. In fact, to the utter consternation of motorists who were wrestling with each other to get across the busy intersection, the rank simply stood under a shaded awning nearby.
Each day the traffic headquarters in Georgetown deploys police ranks to specified locations to help direct traffic. Yet there are times when these ranks simply stand at the side of the roadways near to where they were supposed to be stationed, and watch as chaos reigns.
The traffic authorities must be commended for trying their best to ensure that ranks are deployed to certain locations. But what is missing, it seems, is the presence of supervisory staff to ensure that these ranks begin their work as soon as they arrive and do not, as many do, stand aside and allow chaos to reign.
This is a habit of some traffic ranks that defeats the purpose of sending them out to direct traffic. It is also a sign of indiscipline and something that should not be entertained in the Disciplined Services. On one occasion, a senior officer going to work at the same time had to upbraid some junior officers who were taking shade under a tree while all around them traffic was being held up, because there was no one to direct its flow and also because the traffic lights at that area had been deactivated.
It is hard work to be out in the sun for hours directing traffic. But hard work has never killed anyone, and in any event, in most instances the ranks are usually sent out to work for only a short period, such as during peak hours. Is it too much to ask that they be punctual when they are posted and that they go right to their jobs as soon as they arrive on the scene?
What these problems indicate is that there is a need for the superior officers to move around during peak hours to monitor the actions of the staff that they deploy to various locations. If these superior officers take the time to supervise their staff, then situations would not develop in which police officers can be seen taking shade from the sun when they should be directing traffic.