Dumb

Allow me to be a cranky for a moment.

Moline experienced a power outage yesterday which affected thousands of homes. This of course meant that many traffic lights were not operating. The story today on Quad Cities Online reports that there weren't too many problems because of signals not working, and includes this quote from Moline cop, Greg Crouch.

The Moline Police Department did not have officers man the intersections. Sgt. Greg Crouch said there are hundreds of intersections within the city. "We can't man all of them," he said.

Hey, there's some great reasoning, eh? I'm not saying that they should have necessarily been manning intersections, but that is one stupid excuse.

Needless to say, no one would expect them to direct traffic at every single intersection in the city, (and of course, the power was out in only one portion of town, but why quibble), but it surely wouldn't be impossible to man maybe a few of the busiest.

I'm not the only one that has noted that Moline appears to be crawling with cops. You can't swing a dead cat without hitting one it seems. But I suppose responding to something like this might cut into their valuable on-the-clock "conference" time while parked in various hiding spots across the city. (And they have some good ones. Feel free to report some you've noticed in comments.)

One can imagine if a resident reported that an entire neighborhood was being burglarized but no cops responded, Crouch would say, "Hey, there are thousands of houses within the city, we can't respond to all of them."