The city of Keene, New Hampshire claims that the problem isn’t the “Robin Hood” brigade of people who feed parking meters in the city in order to save drivers from tickets. No, they can fill meters with coins all day long and the city government claims that it won’t mind. The problem, claims the city, is that the merry band of meter-feeders are harassing and stressing out all three parking enforcement officers and being nuisances while they save residents from tickets. So the city has sued them.

Group members have harassed parking enforcement officers while they were off the clock, the city manager claims. In a letter that ran in the Keene Sentinel over the weekend, he called the Robin Hood movement “a six-month campaign of pursuit and intimidation of the city’s parking enforcement officers with the stated intention of eliminating their employment.”

Team Robin Hood disagrees with that assessment, and they point out that the only off-the-clock incident happened when one member of the group happened to encounter a parking enforcement officer elsewhere. That happens in small cities…and in large ones.

It’s not incidental that the Robin Hood group are part of the Free State Project, a group with the aim of shrinking the government. They admit to filming and interacting with the parking officers, but not to “harassment.” The city’s issue, apparently, isn’t depriving the officers of the opportunity to write tickets: it’s filming them. The meter feeders have been ordered to stay at least fifty feet away from parking enforcement officers, which will make their videos a lot less interesting.

Keene sues six parking meter ‘Robin Hoods’ who put money in expired meters [Union Leader]
City Sues ‘Robin Hood’ Group [WTIC]

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