4 Bicycle-Riding Inglewood Youths Find Summer Job Is Just the Ticket : Law enforcement: It’s tough to be the author of bad tidings, but teen-agers cite between 160 and 170 illegally parked cars on a six-hour shift.

Just a month before Martell Bland started his summer job, he got a ticket for parking his mother’s car in an alley in downtown Inglewood.

He made the usual protests: He was only away from the car for a minute, he told the ticket writer. There were other cars parked nearby. Couldn’t she let him off?

The answer came without hesitation: No.

Now Bland is on the other side of that exchange. Now he gets to hear the flimsy excuses. Now he gets to write the tickets. Now he gets to say without hesitation: No.

Bland, an 18-year-old graduate of Morningside High School, is one of four Inglewood teen-agers hired for the summer to ticket illegally parked cars in Inglewood’s congested downtown area. His colleagues are Saana Robinson, 17, and Argelia Alejo and Chris Metoyer, both 18.

The unusual summer youth program is all the more noteworthy because the four “special enforcement officer trainees,” as they are officially known, patrol Inglewood’s streets on white, three-speed beach cruiser bicycles bearing the official Inglewood municipal seal.

The leader of the pack is former Inglewood Mayor Merle Mergell, a special enforcement officer who has been using a bicycle on the job for the past year.

He estimates that one in 10 cars parked in the downtown area are there illegally. Getting at all those violators is cumbersome with a city car because of the narrow downtown streets. Walking around with a citation pad leads to exhaustion. The maneuverability of the bicycle makes it the ideal tool for ticketing, he said.

Getting hired for the summer job was no cakewalk. The teen-age applicants were interviewed and asked to answer essay questions. The essays gauged their writing skills and their on-the-job ethics. One question asked: What would you do if a close friend approached you in mid-ticket and said you were citing his parents’ car? (The correct answer was to keep writing and explain to the friend that you were only doing your job.)

Since the four recruits began working last month, they have more than doubled the number of citations issued per day. By issuing between 160 and 170 citations per six-hour shift, the recruits are bringing in enough to city coffers to cover their $9.33-an-hour salaries, the cost of their uniforms and beach cruisers--and their boss’s salary as well.

They are also gleaning important skills.

“They are learning something they will have to know for the rest of their lives: how to deal with people in adverse situations,” Mergell said. “You can’t learn that from textbooks in school.”

The teen-agers have been cursed at, called names, pleaded with and offered every excuse in the book: I was just getting change. I was only here a minute. I’m from out of town. I didn’t see the red zone. The meter’s broken.

The two women in the group have even been asked out to dinner--if they would only dispose of that pesky citation.

But rules are rules. Mergell has hammered one rule into their heads. Each of them can recite it. Once the pen hits the citation pad, they must continue writing no matter who is on the receiving end of the ticket or what rational excuse they offer. Municipal parking ordinances are municipal parking ordinances.

Robinson, who writes 27 citations on a good day, has cited a police officer or two who were illegally parked near Inglewood Police Headquarters. One ran after her bicycle spewing out the excuses. She did the right thing by pedaling on to the next expired meter.

A 1990 graduate of St. Mary’s Academy, Robinson plans to study child psychology at Cal State Long Beach when her summer of ticket writing is over. She had considered working at a day-care center this summer but is finding that she is learning much in her career field right on the streets of Inglewood.

“You have to be very patient,” she said of her work. “You can’t let it bother you if they yell or scream.”