Pittsburgh's finest (I didn't say at what...)

[cellio]

A quiz: You are approaching a ramp for a turn -- that is, traffic only enters that ramp from the direction from which you are coming, and there's a gentle turn with plenty of exposure. A police car is parked on the far side of the ramp (where the road you're on continues). There is plenty of room to enter the ramp behind the police car. Someone is sitting in the car. There are no cones, flares, blockades, or the like behind the car.

Is the ramp closed?

I couldn't tell, so I pulled up to the beginning of the ramp (to get out of traffic), put on my blinkers, and started to get out of the car to go ask. Before I got that far, a police officer jumped out of the car and started yelling at me, saying things like "don't you know that when a police car blocks a road that means it's closed?". I said "I couldn't tell if you were trying to block this road, and was coming to ask". (Note: I did not say "So why didn't you park on the part of the ramp that oncoming traffic would actually drive on?" or anything of the sort, though it's a fair question.) The officer continued to be rather rude, and it took me a little while to learn that the entire bridge, not just this ramp to it, was closed. Good thing I asked.

Now to the best of my knowledge, I have never in my life been anything but exceedingly polite and deferential when it comes to dealing with police officers. For that matter, I strive for quite a bit of courtesy when dealing with people in the service industry in general -- mostly because they deserve it until proven otherwise, and partly because of enlightened self-interest. Most of the time, people in the service industry are at least civil, if not polite, to their customers, until circumstances dictate that some other approach is called for. But somehow, in my limited experience, the local police officers seem to be an exception; this isn't the first time that one has started out rude without provocation. It bugs me, because they wield additional power that, say, the clerk at Giant Eagle doesn't wield, and they have a corresponding obligation to use that power wisely. Instead, people like today's specimen use it as license to act like jerks. (And, for those who are wondering, this is anecdotal evidence that this happens to people who aren't members of the commonly-profiled groups, too.)

And a second-order gripe: as I learned later, the Birmingham Bridge was closed at 9:00 this morning because it was icy. (So that police car had been there for a couple hours, at least.) Roads began to get icy at 10:00 last night; where the hell were the salt trucks and snow plows during those 11 hours? There was no snow falling this morning; that bridge should have been ice-free before the morning rush hour ever started.

My tax dollars at rest, I guess. They're sure not at work today.

Comments

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

I will charitably speculate that if the officer had been there for a couple of hours (which I agree is fairly likely) that he had probably already had to deal with a lot of confused and/or angry drivers, and was probably pretty frustrated a) with that in itself, b) with such a boring detail, and c) with the fact that, as you observed, he was "wasting that time" on what should have been a non-issue by this point.

But yes, it does sound like he could have been more effectively placed (especially if he had had prior problems with confused drivers.) And getting pissy was not a constructive way for him to handle it in any case. And at least some officers in Pittsburgh, especially (in my experience) those "managing" traffic, have trouble understanding that just because they have been at a given intersection for hours and have a well-developed internal model of how they want the traffic to flow, that drivers entering this dynamic might not be magically picking up on that same perspective. Or at least, that's been my experience too often.

[cellio]

Good point. The officer was probably pretty frustrated. Though, as you say, backing up 25 feet would have made the problem vanish, and you'd think that thought might have occurred sometime during those (presumed) couple of hours... Oh well; some people are problem-solvers, and some people are ornery twits.