I said that may be, but the two actions should not be directly connected. If the city wants to enforce parking, then they should enforce parking to increase the city revenue and to smooth traffic flow; not to catch the Big Guy. If they want to enforce parking, they should do so regularly and consistently, and because it's the law.
His rejoinder to that was that the best way to gain compliance is irregular enforcement. He's a psychologist and very familiar with schedules of reinforcement (see http://www.psychology.uiowa.edu/Faculty/wasserman/Glossary/schedules.html for instance). I said that it is not the place of the government to train us, but to even-handedly enforce the law. He vehemently disagrees. Bear in mind that he has been a welfare examiner for 20 years. (This kind of leads me to conclude that simply being within the government extinguishes patriotism.)
So we have two issues here: 1) Does government have an 'inalienable' right to summarily use one law in order to catch someone breaking another? And 2) Does the government have the right to be 'training' us as it's obedient puppets?
I've written more about this, because I've kind of been stewing about it, but that's enough for one post. My head hurts.
Please feel free to comment at any length about it. This is a subject that really gets to my core.