Police basketball hoop take, LIEs

[EPW]

Police take basketball hoops from neighborhood. lady sits on basketball hoop. Cops come. Cop says they can keep hoop, but it has to come down. Cops take hoop. Homeowners mad.

[ColdWizard]

Link

The McCaffertys and at least seven other residents of Radnor Green and Ashbourne Hills received letters warning them this would happen. Police and Delaware Department of Transportation officials say their hoops, angled toward the street, violate the state's Free Zone law, which prohibits hoops, trees, shrubs and other objects from being within seven feet of the pavement's edge in subdivisions.

...

A 2005 state law specifically directs DelDOT to remove things that are in the right of way, which includes the small spat of grass before the curb begins in many neighborhoods. This is done to protect motorists and the people playing sports, according to the law.

...

These basketball hoops were removed because of complaints made by a resident, DelDOT said.

"We're sympathetic to these parents and what they want to do for the young people, but we've got to operate by the statute," said Geoff Sundstrom, spokesman for DelDOT. "We're not out in search of basketball hoops to cut down."

Not everyone in the neighborhood viewed the chopped-down hoops as a tragedy.

Tom Blythe, 86, said he was among several people on the street who complained to the state about the basketball hoops. The children don't watch for traffic, he said, and the number of kids coming from outside the neighborhood to play on the hoops has gotten out of hand.

"You see kids from all over the place down here," Blythe said. "They're down here making all kinds of noise and disturbing the peace."

Blythe said some people on the block have unfairly demonized him for complaining about the hoops. They've labeled him an old grouch who doesn't like kids, he said. But he was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame in 2006 for starting and running a variety of youth sports leagues throughout his life.

"I'm the one getting the rap for all this," he said. "You can see I'm not against kids. I love kids, and I love sports."

Link

"It's a situation that never should have come about," John McCafferty said after his meeting with Delaware State Police internal affairs. "I don't want the 15 minutes of fame. I don't want anything else. I want to turn the clock back to Thursday ... and go out and play basketball with my kids and make everything normal again. That's all I want."

He doesn't want the 15 minutes but only screamed injunction when they finally get around to yanking the pole out of the ground instead of filing one after getting the letter?

[Ming]

Yep... a day late and a dollar short. If he really wanted to save it, he should have responded right away instead of making his "final stand"

However, the ***** that lied to him about allowing him to keep it, and then taking it away was completely in the wrong. If the law states they can "take it away" she should have said so instead of lying. If her intent was to settle things down and back him off, the lie didn't help. She knew he was going to get even more pissed off when they took it away and saw that she had lied to him.