Why You Shouldn’t Be a Parking Officer in San Francisco!
In a recent event, a San Francisco woman punched a parking officer for giving her a parking ticket. Of course, I can understand the frustrations as sometimes parking officers in San Francisco can be really annoying as hell, especially if they write you a ticket even though you are there at the last second.
But that is no reason to punch anyone and this woman suffers the consequences:
The incident happened Nov. 21, 2006, after Barsi wrote a parking ticket for Magailalio’s car on Valencia Street outside St. Luke’s Hospital. Magailalio was inside with her then-8-year-old son at a doctor’s appointment.
Magailalio came out, saw Barsi writing the ticket and asked her to rip it up. Barsi told her she could appeal to the parking control agency and drove off.
Magailalio followed in her car and confronted Barsi again a few blocks away, swore at the parking control officer, then punched her repeatedly before a bystander pulled her away. Barsi suffered a dislocated shoulder and missed eight months of work.
“I need to watch my temper. I know I’m wrong,” Magailalio told police at the scene.
Prosecutor Victor Hwang asked Ross to sentence Magailalio to time behind bars, preferably three years in state prison. “A message must be sent,” he said, based on the injury alone.
He said later that the city’s parking control officers should be protected by the courts and that assaults on them should be dealt with harshly.
Sentencing Magailalio to home detention, he told Ross, would be equivalent to ordering her to spend six months “watching big-screen TV.”
Barsi addressed the court, telling Magailalio: “Home detention, frankly, is a joke. You need to pay for your actions in County Jail.”
Defense attorney Joe O’Sullivan pointed out that Magailalio had no criminal history and said she would benefit from taking anger management classes. He also noted that his client lives in public housing and has no big screen TV.
The moral?
I just don’t think being a parking officer is a smart idea in San Francisco or any metropolitan city where you are really risking your life to get beat someday. Unless they let actual police officers do the actual jobs, parking officers will always have to watch out for crazies.
My advice, don’t be a parking officer no matter what, perhaps that is the worst job of all. Don’t get me wrong, I love my local parking officers who give tickets to nearby college students who park in my neighborhood. (thanks for that btw, otherwise our neighborhood would never have an empty parking spot!)
Tags: parking officer, san-francisco, why
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