A blatant abuse of power
Letter to the Editor
Lately the environment has been really nice here at Notre Dame. The weather is nice and people socialize more outside. Unfortunately, there has been an issue that has been annoying my friends and I. To put it simply, I feel that the Notre Dame Police Department has been abusing their power recently.
First of all, I just want to say that they are not a "real" police department, they are merely a security unit. I guess that they use the fact that it says police on their cars and try to show some authority that they don't necessarily have.
Just the other day my friend was driving down Edison avenue and was stopped for speeding. It turns out that it was the Notre Dame police. The officer gave him a ticket for speeding. After careful examination we discovered that it is not a ticket but a complaint to the local police department. My friend went to the local court to set up a court date and found out that Notre Dame officers, being merely security guards, can't give tickets off campus.
On another occasion, one of my other friends had his parents come over for the weekend. As a birthday present they left him a brand new car. Since my friend had a long schedule on Mondays he decided to wait until the evening or until Tuesday to buy a parking decal and register his new car. Until he has his D2 decal he parked in the visitor's parking lot. This seems appropriate since he just got the car and had nowhere else to park. The day had not gone by and he received 2 tickets! One for parking in the visitor's lot and one for not having a parking decal. This came to a total expense of $65!
My situation is that I keep getting parking tickets. I sometimes go run errands during the day in between classes. Since it is so hard to find a place to park in D2 I just leave my car in the visitor's lot for just an hour or two. Well until recently this was never a problem. Now I have three tickets.
If all that the security guards — not police officers — do is go around and give parking tickets or even worse go off campus to give speeding tickets then I say lower their funding, maybe they'll find better things to do with their time than to abuse their power and pick on us students.
Jeremy Beau
Sophomore
Knott Hall
March 23, 2000
All Viewpoint Stories for Monday, March 27, 2000
