On February 2nd, I posted an article, Parking Privileges, about obviously healthy people using handicap parking. At the time of that posting, with my mother-in-law in a wheelchair and the recent passing of a brother-in-law who had been wheelchair bound for nearly 30 years, it was a sensitive issue for Karen and me. With the recent paralysis of our great-niece, Toni, we’ve become even more aware of it.
Yesterday, when we were driving through the parking lot of Sam’s Wholesale Club in North Little Rock, we noticed an empty police cruiser stopped near the entrance. A little further on, we saw the officer, standing next to the driver’s side window of a white pickup with handicap tags in the closest handicap parking spot to the building. It appeared that he was writing the driver a ticket.
Yes!
Of course, we don’t know the story and are only interpreting it based on a few visual clues. However, what we think probably happened was that the police officer saw an individual with no obvious disabilities walk up to the truck and get in it.
It’s not right for a perfectly healthy person to park in a handicap reserved spot. That spot is then unavailable for someone who really needs it. If it’s not illegal, it should be.
Of course, it could be that the officer knew the driver and was just writing some information down that the driver was telling him. We never actually saw him give the driver anything. By the time we had hiked from way out where we found a spot, the police cruiser was driving away and the white truck was backing out of the parking spot.
I prefer to believe that we saw a small bit of justice being served.
A lost Exit78 post, recovered from Internet Archive WayBackMachine; March 2011
