Beverly Hills Parking Tickets

I too was a victim of the Beverly Hills parking ticket scam.

In March, 1985, I received notice of a parking violation from Beverly Hills. I knew that I had not parked in that area, so I wrote a letter explaining that they must have misread the citation. I asked them to check the original and to mail me a copy if they felt it was indeed my license number and model on the ticket. After receiving no reply, I assumed the matter was settled. To my surprise, my next auto registration had a $75 fee attached for a “delinquent” ticket!

I went to the Beverly Hills court clerk’s office to get a copy of the ticket in order to vindicate myself. I was told by a clerk that I couldn’t have a copy of the ticket because it was sent to a data processing firm, which enters the data and then destroys the original!

My right to face my accuser was thus taken away by some unknown clerk in a commercial data processing house. I went to court empty-handed, with no way “to prove my innocence” (that seems somewhat backwards to me). The judge said, “The citation matches both the license and the model of your car. It seems unlikely that could happen by chance.” The judge assumed, as most people would, that the license and model would be cross-checked, and that any mismatch would cause the ticket to be rejected.

Apparently that is not the case. It seems likely that the citation-data entry program instead searches for the closest match to the (possibly partial) license number, and inserts the correct model, rather than verifying it! The computer probably supplies any information needed to complete the citation.

Why would they do this? Do you suppose the data processor and Beverly Hills lose money when a ticket is rejected, hence a ticket is never rejected due to misinformation?

Seidler was right when he said “Beverly Hills doesn’t pull names out of a hat.” They pull names out of a computer , which is much more efficient and lucrative!

MARK JOHNSON

Torrance