Thankless job

Across the mean streets of Spokane Valley, the wheels of justice turn slowly.

The speedometer of Ray Westlake’s retired cop car barely shows signs of life as the 68-year-old SCOPE volunteer pulls up to the handicapped parking stalls at Lowe’s Home Improvement Center. He stops and turns on his amber overhead lights as his partner “Eagle Eye” Al Fisher reaches for an ever-slimming book of citations for handicapped-parking infractions.

“Looks like we got one,” says Fisher, who leaps from his shotgun seat with a jackrabbit spryness to give a turquoise Chevy Silverado the once over. There’s no handicapped-driver placard hanging from the rearview mirror. No oxygen bottle or anything else in the front seat that might suggest the driver of this rig suffers from anything other than laziness, yet still parked right beside Lowe’s front door.

This will be a $250 ticket, says Fisher, a community policing volunteer. And he should know. Last year the duo of Westlake and Fisher issued nearly $100,000 in citations for handicapped parking stall violations. Their 389 citations account for 70 percent of all handicapped parking tickets handed out in Spokane Valley in 2006.

“They do a great service for the community and the agency,” says Brett Gores, traffic sergeant for the Spokane Valley police. “It frees up our officers to respond to in-progress situations and in-progress patrol calls.”

Gores says there are actually 14 volunteers patrolling the Valley for parking offenses – all members of the Sheriff’s Community Oriented Policing Effort. Fisher and others do the job out of an interest in community service and a personal worry that they’ll grow old laying on the couch if they just stay home.

Theirs is a relatively thankless job. Westlake and Fisher have been cussed at and screamed at. Men have threatened to ram their car. If the cost of the ticket isn’t enough to get offenders riled up, the fact that Westlake and Fisher glue them to the driver’s-side door window usually is. Middle-aged women have threatened them with violence.

“I have been called every name in the book,” says Fisher, who does practically all the talking for this dynamic duo, while Westlake offers cowboy-esque yeps and nopes for emphasis.

Fisher: “One lady threatened to kick my ass.”

Westlake: “Ummmm Hmmmm.”

Fisher: “It’s not the young kids who are doing this. The average age of the people is 35 to 40 years old, and the majority of them are women.”

Westlake: “Oh, yeah.”

The list of people Westlake and Fisher catch illegally using the handicapped stalls reads like a who’s who of sloth. Spouses and children of disabled people long dead, sometimes use their departed’s blue parking decals for as long as possible. People temporarily disabled occasionally buy themselves an extra month or even an extra couple years of front-door parking privileges by forging the expiration dates of their limited passes. And then there are people just willing to gamble that they won’t get a $250 ticket if they park in a handicapped stall and rush into a store real quick.

The duo issued one of their more memorable tickets to a man who was using a handicap placard that belonged to his dead wife. When Fisher informed the man that officials were aware the wife was deceased, the man quickly explained that he’d been using his old wife’s placard for his new wife, who was also disabled. The ruse didn’t end until Fisher spotted the man at the ticket window in the Spokane Valley Police Department. Parked in the handicapped stall right at the front door was the man’s car, bogus placard hanging from the rearview mirror, no “new wife” in the passenger’s seat. As authorities escorted the man out to his car to retrieve the placard, Fisher wrote yet another $250 ticket.

There is a pile of confiscated passes in the glove box of Fisher and Westlake’s SCOPE car. Some are expired. Some are altered, like one pass originally intended to expire in 2006 before someone with a hole punch cut out the last two digits of 2009, inverted the numbers and plugged the original expiration date.

To the untrained eye, maybe an altered parking pass looks good enough for a few more months or years. However Fisher and Westlake have learned to look for more than which dates have been cut out of the pass for expiration. Fisher actually reads the serial number indicating the manufacturing batch to which the pass belongs. And he does so from the passenger’s seat of the SCOPE car as Westlake keeps it moving at 10 mph.

The two patrol like this eight hours a day, five days a week, 124 miles an outing. The mileage on their Crown Victoria is well into six digits. The “needs maintenance” light on the dashboard glows eternally; Westlake, a retired trucker, has actually pasted a Band-Aid over the feature to block its annoying glare.

As the two roll past a Subway Sandwiches and Salads on East Sprague, their attention is drawn to a sporty white Volvo, parked in a handicapped stall, with no placard hanging from its rearview mirror. The SCOPE car backs up until it’s directly behind the Volvo, making escape impossible. Westlake works a dashboard toggle switch activating the car’s overhead lights as Fisher goes investigating.

There is a placard taped to the Volvo’s side window. Fisher whips out a bright yellow index card and places it beneath the driver’s side windshield wiper. The card warns the Volvo’s owner that although his decal is valid it needs to be hung from the rearview mirror or placed on the dash if there’s no mirror. The only exception to the rule is when the car has a wheelchair logo on its license plate.

“This guy’s a newcomer at this,” says Fisher, stepping back in the car. “Some of our biggest offenders are handicapped people not hanging their placards.”

There are drivers who are eligible for handicapped parking permits who just never bother to buy one. Westlake and Fisher try to nudge them back onto the right side of the law.

“There’s an older lady who drives a white Buick, we catch her all the time. She won’t get a placard,” Fisher says. “I told her, ‘I’m going to give you a ticket.’ She says ‘I’m 92 years old.’ I tell her, ‘Take some of those moldy dollars in your purse and get a placard.’ “

You can hide, but even at 10 mph the wheels of justice will eventually run you down.