TRIBUTE OR NUISANCE? DOWNEY AND THE DILEMMA OF ROADSIDE MEMORIALS
By Ben Baeder
DOWNEY (Via DowneyBeat.com)—First it was about five candles, five bouquets of flowers and a few signs and posters. Then more candles came. Now the roadside memorial to Michael Nida stretches a full 30 feet on the sidewalk along Paramount Boulevard just south of Imperial Highway.
Nida’s friends carefully maintain the display, daily scraping off any wax drippings and cleaning up dead flowers and garbage.
The stretch of curb is a tribute to the South Gate father of four, who was shot to death by a Downey Police officer Oct. 22 after he twice fled from police. He was unarmed.
Police, who were responding to a robbery at a nearby ATM, said Nida made “aggressive” move before the shooting. Officers later learned Nida was not involved in the robbery and was out with his wife.
Roadside memorials like the one dedicated to Nida present unsolvable dilemmas for municipalities, who are legally required to maintain public right of ways in the city, according to those who have studied the phenomenon.
1 Comment
I do not believe there is any reason whatsoever to be defeatist about this challenge or to consider it to be to any degree “unsolvable.”
People have a natural right to reasonable public expressions of their grief and should be accomodated for a reasonable period of time after which they should be required to remove any memorial erected on public property or understand that it will be removed for them.
The time frame should be determined through a consensus of the public in a given jurisdiction, since it is they who will be constrained and since it is they, collectively -and not the city or county government- to whom these public properties belong.
2-3 weeks seems reasonable to me but, as mentioned, that should be a time frame for the people in a given jurisdiction to determine.