Crackdown at Disney

LAKE BUENA VISTA (Orlando Sentinel) – There's a new thrill ride at Walt Disney World that visitors will want to avoid: one in which a police car pursues you. At Disney's request, Orange County deputy sheriffs have been hitting the streets there hard, sometimes writing dozens of traffic tickets a day for violations ranging from speeding to loud stereos, a Sentinel analysis has found. The crackdown marks a dramatic change at Disney World. For a long time, uniformed traffic officers in marked patrol cars were hard to find on Disney roads. Not anymore. Disney's attitude of keeping uniformed police barely visible to tourists changed after 9-11 when it began encouraging deputies to have a higher profile on the property. Then last year – after increased concerns about speeding and traffic violations – the two towns that make up the Disney resort signed landmark contracts with the Orange County Sheriff's Office to double the number of deputies assigned to the area. During their first few months on the job, deputies wrote an average of 26 tickets a day at Disney World – compared with an average of three per day during the first few months of 2004, according to the Sheriff's Office. The pace slowed down by last fall, and the Sheriff's Office said that is partly because traffic has slowed down. But deputies still frequently wrote more than 20 tickets a day during a three-month period examined by the Sentinel. The number of tickets does not surprise Dis-ney officials. "Any day of the week, we have 200,000 people on our property . . . and the more than 100 lane miles of public roads supporting Walt Disney World," said spokeswoman Kim Prunty. "This all goes back to the safety of our guests and cast. Traffic safety is important to us." To get a closer look at the ef-fort, the Sentinel reviewed data on 1,212 tickets that deputies wrote in August, September and October of last year. The Sentinel then randomly selected 10 percent of those tickets (122) and obtained copies of the actual citations. Among the patterns:

• Locals are getting nabbed much more than tourists.
• Out of 122 tickets examined, 105 drivers were written citations (some got more than one citation).
• Of those, 81 lived in Central Florida, according to the drivers license noted on the ticket. Just seven lived out of state. The rest lived in other parts of Florida.
• Deputies focused mostly on Buena Vista Drive and World Drive.
• However, deputies aren't ignoring other roads; they wrote tickets on 26 different Disney streets in those three months.
• Deputies are far more likely to write tickets at Disney for insurance, registration or vehicle violations than they would in other parts of Orange County.

Disney spokeswoman Prunty said the company wanted a more aggressive approach to traffic, and gave the sheriff no restrictions. "There has not been a directive, go easy on guests, go easy on cast members, go easy on executives," she said. "Nothing like that." Ted Brown of the Sheriff's Office concurred. But Brown acknowledged that some deputies might give tourists a break. "I think your odds are pretty good when you pull somebody over that you're going to pull over a tourist," he said. "Do we really want to get into writing all kinds of tourists tickets versus can the problem be solved by a courtesy notice?"

What a load of coal! Of course they write more tickets to local drivers. If you have a quota to fill and you pull over X number of drivers, you are going to write as many tickets as you think will make money for the county. This means that if you are letting the tourists go, you MUST issue citiations to the locals to keep the quota up! This unfairly targets locals for high fines vs. courtesy notices.