-: Good morning my name is Michael Snowden,
I'm the Park Ranger Manager for the
Department of Parks and Recs here in Washington, D.C.
We have over 70 facilities and parks that we
manage, operate, do programming out of,
things like that.
There's over 500 employees under
Department of Parks and Recs.
And the park rangers come under that,
we do some interpretations,
which is the historical data in the park
telling you how the parks were developed
and we try and, what we do mostly is
interact with the customer base.
Some of the larger parks,
Ft. Stanton, which has a football field,
outdoor pool, indoor recreation center to use,
basketball, some cooking classes,
things of that nature.
And each ranger is assigned a ward where
they'll go and visit the facilities and make sure
everything is fine.
Try and interact with the staff just to make sure
there's anything that we can help them with
or any kind of needs that will enhance the facilities
or anything like that.
So that's the normal day.
As a manager I am responsible for currently
about 12, 11 rangers.
I have to do their planning, day-to-day planning
with how they visit.
We have a run sheet to enhance their patrol
while they're on the street, so they have different
wards that they're assigned,
each ward has several recreation centers
and parks in them that they have to visit,
they spend time with the staff,
they interact with the clients, the constituents.
Other than that I try and provide training for
the rangers from time to time.
I attend a ton of meetings with the
community as well as the DPR staff,
working with other management.
So we're here from 6:30 in the morning
to 10:30 at night and sometimes later
depending on what the events is.
We just had an event last Friday called
Blacks of Wax, that was over at the Arc
and sponsored by the Tennison Learning Center.
So we work with them on their special events
and sometimes it requires us to be here past 10:30
which isn't a problem.
As a park ranger, we are not law enforcement
so we try to minimize the loss of life of course
but what we do more so is report,
we observe and report.
So if there is something going on,
someone is being harmed, we of course
try and protect ourselves and our surroundings
while protecting our public.
So we may get involved on a very minimal basis
but we're more so standing by calling the police,
observing, making notes of who is here,
who was on the scene, what kind of
descriptors we can take down
that when the proper authorities do arrive
we can advise them of what has transpired and why.