Parking officers find ticket rage escalating

Each month since the start of 2015, an average of more than five Toronto parking officers have suffered physical attack or significant verbal threat, according to incident reports reviewed by the Star.

Motorists, furious at fines that are often $30 or $60, routinely chase or drive at officers; run over their feet; threaten to kill them; spit in their faces; strike them with bumpers or side mirrors as the motorists try to drive away; reverse into them; shove, punch, slap and grab them, and throw water bottles, cigarettes and, in one case, a “hard cookie.”

A man head-butted a female parking officer in the nose.

Two officers suffered headaches after hand-held lasers were shone in their eyes.

Fernandes is not alone in getting a hot-coffee bath.

Parking-ticket rage, completely out of proportion to relatively minor fines, and triggering the risk of arrest and far worse punishment, is a mystery even to the man who heads Toronto police’s parking enforcement unit, 18-year veteran Brian Moniz.

“I’ve had police officers who sometimes issue parking tickets tell me that that makes people much angrier than when they ticket them for moving offences,” such as speeding, with bigger fines and even demerit points, Moniz says. “I honestly don’t understand it. “I just don’t know why that is.” Confrontation has always been a hazard of parking enforcement, but the severity of it is escalating, Moniz adds.

In response, his office is publicizing attacks and arrests, to let motorists know they are taken seriously. Next month, it will start new training for all parking officers on how to deal with irate drivers. They are peace officers but carry no weapons, so the focus is on defusing potentially dangerous situations.

Parking enforcement officer Kyle Ashley, well known for his work ticketing bike-lane invaders, has had to call police three times for ticketrelated attacks in less than four years on the job.

The first time, just three months after he started the job, was at the hands of a midwife who came running out of a Starbucks in the Beach as he wrote a ticket.

“She pushed me into a live lane of traffic and then got in her car, started it and, with no care for me being there, drove forward,” Ashley says. “She decided she was going to drive through, so she drove over both my feet and stopped with her car on one foot.”

Java in hand, she told him she was late delivering a baby and drove off.

While she was being charged with offences including assaulting a peace officer, she said to the arresting offi- cer: “You guys should understand, coffee is like gold in our business,” referring to midwives’ marathon work days.

On a separate occasion, also in the Beach, a father and son ran out of a Tim Hortons, jumped into a car and drove straight into Ashley. “I was holding onto the hood of his car for about two blocks.” They were, to Ashley’s knowledge, never caught.

“It’s a sense of entitlement: ‘I can stop at Starbucks. I can stop to pick people up and it doesn’t matter what you say,’ ” Ashley says of the reason for such aggression. “There has been a basic disrespect for the position, a culture of the way people view parking enforcement.”

A reason the confrontations are getting worse, officers say, is the end of the days when parking wardens would often knock on the window of an occupied car and simply tell the driver to move on.

Mayor John Tory’s continuing traffic blitz is part of the reason, coupled with a new appeal system in which tickets can be mailed to motorists even if they drive away.

Ashley has never been called to testify against an abusive driver and is dismayed none of those who have attacked him have received a criminal record.

First-time offenders often escape with a peace bond: that is, a promise to behave. Some are forced to write an apology. A man who used his fist to shove a ticket into Ashley’s vest, and was on probation for another assault, got10 hours’ community service.

“It makes me feel like my work as a civil servant is not valued,” Ashley says. “People should respect the laws and the authority, rather than the authority fearing the people.”

Emilie Smith, a spokesperson for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, said in an email that Crown counsel who prosecute, and sometimes withdraw, Criminal Code charges, screen them with an eye to the “reasonable prospect of conviction” and the public interest.

Sentencing judges, she added, consider the nature of the offence, the offender’s circumstances, sentencing principles in the Criminal Code, relevant case law and input from Crown and defence lawyers.

The man who threw hot coffee into Fernandes’s face got one year probation and an order to write Fernandes an apology.

“He said he’s not that type of person; it was the heat of the moment,” Fernandes says.

“People are angry at the uniform, but they don’t realize they are throwing coffee at, or hitting, a person who has a family, children, parents and, at the end of the day, we are just doing our jobs.

“If you just focus on where your vehicle is parked, you wouldn’t have an issue with us.”