Lack of parking reduces RUPD to meter maids

Rice University police officers need more to do.

Imagine this scene: It is midnight on a Friday, and I am just driving back into Rice to drop off a group of friends from an evening of bowling — a nonalcoholic evening. I have dropped off my friends and am about to pull into Lovett Lot to park my car when I see a police car’s lights flashing and a loud megaphone screaming: “Please pull your car over.” I honestly cannot think of anything I have done wrong: My car is moving at about five miles an hour in the parking lot, and I am just parking.

I stop and wait for the officer to approach and announce my dreaded fate: “You did not use your turn signal when you pulled into the parking lot.” To my look of utter surprise — red and blue lights flashing, the dramatic pullover just for a little turn signal — the officer quickly adds: “And you look like you have been drinking — your eyes are bloodshot.”

Let’s just say that Rice students’ eyes are bloodshot a lot of the time — and not just from drinking. We sometimes get only four hours of sleep per night, study for eight hours straight or eat too much spicy Tex-Mex. For this officer to suggest that I was drinking because my eyes were bloodshot — and thus forgot to use a little flashing light — is ridiculous.

But that is beside the point. The point is that Rice police officers need more to do than take out their boredom on students. I admit that working at Rice is probably not the most exciting law enforcement job in the world — except on Wiess College’s Night of Decadence. Once inside the hedges, life is relatively calm and peaceful.

However, this does not justify giving out an obscene number of parking tickets for idling in 15-minute loading zones or pulling over a student for trivial mistakes. Instead, officers should be grateful for the overall good behavior of the students and reward us by cutting us a little slack for not completely stopping at the stop sign or leaving our car in a loading zone for a few minutes. This also means that officers will be available when my car gets broken into or I need an escort back from the gym late at night.

On the other hand, maybe this is more of an issue that the Rice administration needs to deal with. Maybe this problem is less of a product of police officers’ boredom and more a result of the lack of parking options. With the Abercrombie Lot gone for North College students and the limited spots available in the Lovett Lot, Rice students have the options of either getting a ticket or walking three quarters of a mile to West Lot during the day on weekends. In addition, there are very few short-term options. Students usually put on their flashers and pray that the parking gods will have mercy on them while they put groceries up in their rooms for a few minutes.

Sadly, there are no smiling parking gods — just the merciless police officers who will be out to get me for a rolling stop after I write this column.

Jackie Ammons is Brown College sophomore.

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