Saeed Al-Suraihi
I DO not think that the mission of security men is to hunt down street vendors and to prosecute the owners of illegal stall owners. They have a greater duty to fulfill, and society needs them to keep the country safe.
We should not occupy them with other things that must be the responsibility of other task forces. It would have been better if the municipality recruited supervisors to monitor these vendors and stalls set in random positions.
If the municipality has preoccupied the security men with the tasks that supervisors should be doing, it won’t stop at this point. Distracting security men from their true role and essential task does not include only roaming the streets in search for violating vendors and owners of stalls, but also awaiting the arrival of the municipal supervisors to kindly receive what was seized from those stalls. This is what was revealed in a letter from the director of security patrols to the Jeddah Municipality, pointing to "the late arrival of the municipal representatives when requested by security patrols to take over seizures of illegal street vendors for about two hours in some cases."
If we remember how much we need to preserve the efforts of security forces to maintain security of the citizens and residents and the challenges facing them in this regard, we would realize how much the municipality is unfair to citizens when failing to perform its functions and not waste security men’s precious time.
