Dam­aged cars are be­ing re­moved from the park­ing lot of the St Joseph Po­lice Sta­tion to pro­vide more park­ing for po­lice of­fi­cers and the pub­lic.

This was re­vealed by Snr Supt Richard Smith in re­sponse to con­cern raised by a res­i­dent dur­ing a po­lice town hall meet­ing at the Mara­cas/St Joseph Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre on Thurs­day night.

The res­i­dent com­plained that the num­ber of dam­aged ve­hi­cles clut­ter­ing the sta­tion yard made it dif­fi­cult for peo­ple to find park­ing when com­ing to make a re­port or to give state­ments.

Smith said there are plans to move the dam­aged cars to an­oth­er lo­ca­tion for stor­age. He ex­plained that most of the cars kept at the sta­tion were in­volved in se­ri­ous road traf­fic ac­ci­dents pend­ing fur­ther in­ves­ti­ga­tions, but stor­age of dam­aged ve­hi­cles at the po­lice sta­tion could not be a long-term so­lu­tion.

He said re­cent ef­forts by North­ern Di­vi­sion ACP Os­wain Subero led to the re­moval of three dam­aged cars last week, and he an­tic­i­pat­ed that more will be re­moved over time. How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted that this could be dif­fi­cult, as the fam­i­lies of peo­ple who died in se­ri­ous ac­ci­dents might be hes­i­tant or out­right un­will­ing to have the wrecked cars stored at their homes.

“It’s dif­fi­cult to get peo­ple whose fam­i­lies may have been in­volved in fa­tal or se­ri­ous RTAs to move the wrecked ve­hi­cles from there, more­so if they don’t have much space home to put the wreck­age they tend to not want to come for the ve­hi­cle be­cause of the fact that it has so much mem­o­ries and the psy­cho­log­i­cal ef­fect it has on them,” Smith said.

“But we can­not store all these ve­hi­cles there, so we will be get­ting rid of ve­hi­cles, we will be cre­at­ing park­ing for peo­ple com­ing to make re­ports, as well as the of­fi­cers who work at the sta­tion. It’s a re­al is­sue and your ob­ser­va­tion is a good one but we are work­ing on that.” —Shane Su­perville