Police officers lead city officials in tickets for traffic violations, Taipei City Councilor Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘) of the Taiwan Solidarity Union said on Friday.
He cited statistics from the city’s secretariat showing that since 2012, police officers accounted for almost half of all the tickets received by city employees driving city-owned vehicles, with 732 tickets for illegal parking, 882 for speeding and 76 for running red lights.
The Department of Environmental Protection and the Taipei City Fire Department were other leading offenders.
While city-owned vehicles are required to abide by traffic rules in non-emergency situations, tickets acquired while on duty can be revoked, he said.
Chen called for the ticket cancellation process to be taken out of the hands of the police department and made more rigorous, He added that police officers should face executive punishments for any traffic violation in non-emergency situations.
Officers face no punishment for speeding or running red lights while on duty, he said.
“How can you tell city residents to abide by the rules when public servants driving publicly-owned vehicles have racked up this many violations,” Chen said, accusing the city government of failing punish city officials for violations as it pursues a crack-down on illegal parking.
As part of moves to cancel all free roadside parking spots by the end of the year, the city government has ramped up enforcement of parking rules, cracking down on illegal parking “hotspots” and sharply increasing the number of parking tickets issued.
Lin Yung-sung (林永松), an official in the department’s logistics section, said that high usage of city-owned vehicles around the clock could explain why police officers received a relatively high number of tickets.
Officers are required to pay for any tickets not acquired in the line of duty, he said.
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