Cops Need a Time-Out


1223473889Not since we babysat our neighbor’s two-year-old kid for gas money have we seen such foot-stomping from someone who’s been told “no” as a group of off-duty police showed yesterday during a protest at a construction site being watched by flaggers.

At one point yesterday morning, the officers’ commotion in Woburn forced the state crew to halt its work cleaning the catch basins along Lexington Street.

Woburn Police Chief Philip Mahoney was at the scene and repeatedly warned the off-duty officers to stay behind the white line at the edge of the road. He also ordered several of the officers to remove their vehicles, which had been illegally parked along the side of the street.

The report doesn’t state whether the officers then held their breath until they turned blue in an attempt to get their way, but we wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

If we’d been riding a gravy train that came to such an abrupt halt, we’d be upset too. But with the state’s economic picture looking bleaker by the moment, holding up traffic and causing safety problems isn’t the way to plead your case. The best way to do it is to explain why the cash-strapped state should pay cops up to $40 an hour to watch low-speed work zones.

Unless, of course, there isn’t a compelling public safety reason to keep cops stationed at holes in the ground. In which case, the men and women in blue need to have a juice box and calm down.