Police in Edinburgh have announced a new weapon in the enduring battle between traffic wardens and the public. They are issuing swab kits to the wardens to allow them to collect saliva samples from the growing number of angry drivers who spit at them, so that the DNA can be checked against police records. Traffic wardens throughout the UK now work in virtual combat gear, with padded waistcoats to protect them from stabbings and clip-on ties to lessen the danger of them being throttled.
Nostalgic motorists may recall the palmy days before privatisation when lovable wardens, like Paul McCartney’s “Lovely Rita”, patrolled the streets with the light touch of the great British bobby, stopping only to tut-tut flirtatiously at double-parkers. This Arcadia never existed. Traffic wardens, first used in London after the introduction of parking meters in 1958, have always been detested. And the reason has always been the same: drivers do not consider parking offences “serious” and see wardens as mere auxiliaries, without the true authority of the law.
In the late 1960s, the ethnographer Joel Richman conducted extensive fieldwork among a little-known tribe with strange, arcane rituals: Salford traffic wardens.
Richman followed wardens on their beat as they were harangued, usually by well-spoken motorists, for having the temerity to stop them parking illegally. But he also found that wardens let locals off with a friendly warning, allowed people a small amount of extra meter time, and were especially soft on female drivers, believed to be less endowed with natural road sense. The wardens averaged fewer than two and a half tickets a day.
This is what has changed: wardens for private operators now work on incentives, on top of a low hourly rate, and are urged to issue as many tickets as possible. The late 1990s docusoap Clampers turned two wardens for Southwark Council into folk devils, simply because they were zealous in pursuit of their duties. The People, taking exception to a boast by one of the wardens that he had ticketed 108 cars on the first day of a new parking zone, claimed: “The place for this rat is on the dole.”
The loathing inspired by traffic wardens today stems from a supposed conflict of interest between law enforcement and revenue-raising. As public services are farmed out to shadowy corporations, enforcement becomes more likely to be seen not as the legitimate exercise of authority but as a form of licensed racketeering. Hence all the tabloid stories about the bounty hunters who slap parking tickets on fire engines and buses waiting at bus stops.
As Edinburgh’s war on spitting motorists suggests, clamper-haters now make few distinctions between the not-for-profit police wardens and the incentivised contract workers. While public services are commonly criticised for their inefficiency and bureaucracy, clampers are derided for their ruthless, clinical efficiency in quelling potential parking anarchy. For this, they are manhandled, abused and spat at.
Joe Moran is a lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University
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