In her four years as a university parking enforcement officer, Natalie Harris has been stalked, yelled at and called a bitch.
Drivers on the campus – especially students – do not take kindly to Harris, who doles out 40 to 50 parking tickets each shift.
“I get yelled at pretty much at least once a day,” said Harris, a 2006 alumna, as she drove around the campus parking lots and roads, on the lookout for cars without permits or parked at expired meters. “Sometimes people are really disrespectful … there’s definitely a sentiment of entitlement among the students.”
But Harris, one of the Department of Transportation Services’ 18 parking enforcement officers, would be hard-pressed to find a student who sympathizes with her struggle.
“Some of the [parking enforcement officers] are nice, but some of them are very cold and unapproachable,” said senior kinesiology major Robert Duru as he cautiously fed quarters into a meter in Lot Q, just outside Cambridge Hall.
“One time I got a ticket while I was looking for change,” Duru continued. “I think they should give a 15-minute grace period.”
Harris may not wait 15 minutes, but she said she is flexible.
“I’m not going to be sitting there like ‘5,4,3 … ‘ I give a grace period.”
Still, Harris’ lenience, along with a friendly ticket program implemented in January 2007 that requires officers to issue a warning ticket if the car has no prior parking violations, hardly reduces the campus-wide resentment toward these workers.
DOTS issued about 78,000 parking tickets for a total of $2.7 million in fines during fiscal year 2007, according to the department’s website.
The Diamondback rode along with Harris for an hour to see the ticketing from another point of view.
Harris drove for ten minutes, nonchalantly humming along to OutKast’s “The Way You Move” playing on the radio, before spotting a violation – a car parked in a courier spot outside Marie Mount Hall.
Before you could have said “$75 ticket,” she had moved on to Lot KK and was about to write another ticket when the car’s owner appeared, with a decidedly dejected expression.
“You got me?” the driver asked, appearing certain of his doomed fate.
Harris gave him a pass because she had not finished writing the ticket, something Harris said she does regularly unless the car is blocking a fire lane.
Such a friendly encounter is refreshing for Harris, considering unpleasant past experiences. She said that while students harass her most frequently, she has had several alarming incidents with professors, as well.
“A professor parked at a meter and didn’t pay it, so I wrote him a citation,” Harris recalled. “So he comes running at me. He asks me, ‘What’s your name? I’m going to report you.’ He tells me how long he’s been working here, what type of research he’s done.”
Harris said visitors have been equally irate upon receiving tickets. In one instance outside of Susquehanna Hall, a man started cursing at her for issuing a parking ticket. She drove away, hoping to end the argument. But the man tracked her down elsewhere on the campus and demanded that she take him to the DOTS office. She obliged, allowing him to follow her in a separate car to the office.
Before he entered the office, Harris said, “I wound up giving him a quarter for the meter [outside the DOTS office], too, and he was still cursing at me,” Harris said.
Parking enforcement officers said they had to learn to ignore the ticket recipients’ reactions.
“I’m doing what I’ve been trained to do. I try to be the good guy,” said Kevin, a parking enforcement officer who chose not to reveal his last name due to departmental policy against speaking to the media. “I try to avoid giving people tickets, but if you notice that [a car] has been there for a while, then you have to give a ticket.”
Kevin, who has been working at the university for only two months, said he worries that supervisors might fire him if they notice him repeatedly missing tickets.
Before ending the ride-along, Harris stressed the department places much importance on non-ticket-related functions, such as giving directions to lost visitors and helping people with car problems.
“It’s more looking out for the campus community than, ‘Oh, there goes a ticket, let’s get ’em,'” she mimicked in a rigid tone. “They don’t see me as their friendly neighbor.”
As Harris drove away and continued her shift, Duru parked his car outside Cambridge Hall. Just as he was about to walk away, something pulled him back towards his car. Hoping to avoid ticket No. 101, he put one more coin in the meter, just for good measure.
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