Cars Held Hostage by Scotland Yard : In London, Illegal Parkers Get the ‘Boot’

Britain’s pert, uniformed meter maids, made famous by a Beatles song about a lovely one called Rita, are being upstaged by the dreaded “Denver Boot.”

Scotland Yard’s zealous--some say overzealous--attack on illegally parked cars has turned London into the world’s car-clamping capital and has prompted a storm of protests.

The Denver Boot, developed in Colorado in the 1950s, fits over a wheel, immobilizing a car until the driver pays a fee and a crew comes to unlock it. That can take hours.

The metropolitan police department decided to get tough 18 months ago when it “privatized” clamping by contracting the practice to two private companies.

Today, 22 squads, each consisting of a civilian “clamper” and a police officer, prowl the inner-London boroughs of Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea and Camden. They clamp 400 to 500 vehicles a day and the civilian clampers get paid an undisclosed sum for each one, which critics say encourages them to overclamp.

“London uses the clamp as an enforcement tool more than any other city,” said Scotland Yard Chief Inspector John Marle.

Events like the Chelsea flower show and sales at Harrods department store can prove bonanzas for clampers, who can immobilize a car in seconds.

The crackdown has proved a boon for some clever entrepreneurs who have launched a whole new industry: commercial unclamping.

Young men have formed squads of radio-carrying motorcycle riders who, for a fee, will go pay the clamping fee.

Parking has long been a problem in this puzzling city of squares and alleys, where 350,000 cases of illegal parking occur daily.

“The streets of London were being clogged with illegally parked vehicles,” Marle said, sounding very official. “This prevented vehicles from moving around the capital with ease.”

Scotland Yard turned to clamping because “all other methods failed,” Marle said.

The high-profile clamp hasn’t, and illegal parking has dropped 40% in certain areas, he said.

Here are the gory details:

After a driver gets over the shock of discovering that his car has been clamped, he must go to one of three payment points in the city and pay a $43 clamping fine, followed by a $20 parking fine.

Then he must wait for an unclamping crew to arrive. Cars are freed in order of fees paid, and crews themselves can get caught in traffic.

“We would not expect anybody to wait more than four hours,” the chief inspector said.

Among the “unclampers,” the Car Clamp Recovery Club, which calls itself the original and biggest, charges a $44 annual fee and $14 per job. For an additional, minimum $26, it will deliver a car to a destination of the customer’s choice.

The critics claim that clamping exacerbates the problem by cuffing cars exactly where they don’t belong.

Mark Reed, a real estate agent, said persistent clamping forced him to sell his agency and move. “It’s going to affect business in a big way in central London,” he said.

Jacqueline Pruskin, who operates art galleries in Kensington and Chelsea, said clamping hurts people, such as plumbers, whose livelihood depends on mobility, as well as merchants, whose customers are frightened off by the clamp threat.

Fortunately, not too many drivers get violent about it.

“There’s been an odd incident, but very odd,” Marle said. He conceded, however, that “There’s a lot of verbal violence.”

Reed freely admits to using strong language when he caught a clamper crawling down the street trying to to clamp his car unnoticed.

“I said, ‘This is a pretty right-wing sort of Nazi thing you’re doing,”’ Reed recalled.

Newspapers have reported clampers nabbing ambulances, tour buses, disabled cars, a participant in a funeral procession and a van bringing meals to the homeless.

Marle calls the reports “outrageous journalese,” saying the police don’t clamp cars where it would be obstructive or dangerous. Those vehicles, they remove.

“Genuine mistakes are sometimes made,” he said, “and we correct them as fast as we can.”