Petition laws West Virginia West Virginia

[spauldo8426]

Hello, I live in the small town of (small town) West Virginia. We have started a petition drive to seek the following of our government.

The hiring of another police officer

Sensitivity training for current and future officers

Elimination of the ride along practice (officers bring their girlfriends to work)

Officers to spend more time on active patrol instead of reactive

Additional street lights in the alley ways

Support of the formation of a neighborhood watch.

Now i am paraphrasing as the actual petition uses much more professional language.

Now, we have had our meetings and the petition is going well, we are getting some interference from our local officers, they park out side the homes of certain committee members trying to intimidate us. Our city government has accused us of trying to take over the town, and has said that we may only submit signatures from one person per household. Thereby limiting our ability to get every registered voter on the petition which so far has had only 2 refusals out of the one-hundred signatures gathered so far.

I have suggested to my committee members that perhaps we should simply seek a writ of mandamus from the county government to enforce existing ordinances. After all most of what we want is covered by some ordinance or another in the city charter. They feel that only an attorney could request such an action and that it is cost preventative. I argue that if submitted by petition that it could be done. As of now we have pretty much been told that all of our requests will be voted down out of sheer spite.

Our town has become overrun with crime as i mentioned in another thread. People are afraid in their homes and we are fighting with our local police who are more concerned with arresting kids for playing stick ball in the street than arresting actual criminals.

Any advice?

[lolcat]

Try contacting your State Representative. A lot of times these politicians can help with situations that are out of the ordinary.