‘There was no effective method of dealing with the unpaid tickets until the booting program came into being.’

In April of 1987, Los Angeles traffic control officers began attaching a clamp-like device known as the Boot on vehicles they found with multiple unpaid parking tickets on record.

Booting cars was chosen by a frustrated city Department of Transportation as a way to chisel away at a massive, $100-million backlog of parking fines, city Parking Administrator Robert Yates said.

Two years later, parking violators in Los Angeles still abound, even with the advent of the Boot. The number of Boot-eligible vehicles on file--those with five or more outstanding tickets--has grown from 65,000 to about 95,000, said Kaye Beechum, city parking enforcement manager.

But given the rise in parking violators in Los Angeles, the 85% collection ratio on fines now is an improvement from pre-boot years, when about half of all parking tickets issued would not be paid, Beechum said.

The Boot, introduced in Denver and now common in many cities, is fixed onto the car’s front wheel, preventing it from moving. Drivers finding their vehicles fitted with the contraption have three days to pay all their outstanding parking tickets, plus a $35 booting fee, or the vehicle is towed and the recovery fees rise to at least $50, officials said.

About 4,273,688 parking tickets have been issued in the city in the last year, Beechum said. That’s 488 every hour.

In just two years, the Boot has been slapped onto 21,781 cars. Of those, about 12,000 have been retrieved by their reproachful owners, Beechum said. Unclaimed vehicles are sold for lien, to pay off their owner’s parking debts and the cost of booting, towing and storing. Any car sale profit goes back into the budget that supports the Department of Motor Vehicles, she said.

“It’s a start,” Beechum said. “There was no effective method of dealing with the unpaid tickets until the booting program came into being.”

These days 70 to 80 cars a day are clamped by a dozen city-employed traffic officers who are assigned solely to work on the Boot beat. Fitters roam the city streets, concentrating on areas where chronically illegal cars and Boot candidates are reported by neighbors.

“The booting unit is kind of an elite group,” Beechum said. “They enjoy catching these violators and everyone in the department appreciates their actions. It gives encouragement to other officers to know that tickets they are writing are going to get paid.”

The booting unit has an arsenal of about 400 boots--which cost $350 each--beefed up from the original 200 the program began with, she said. The devices used in Los Angeles are made by Palma Auto-Boot of Arlington, Va.

Since the program started, 219 boots have been stolen or destroyed, Beecham said. “The assumption is, before the city could get to the booted car, owners towed it to a secluded location and the boots were cut or pried off,” she said. In addition, at least one boot-related scam has caught some used-car buyers.

Escaped vehicles--those which have had the Boot removed illegally--have been sold to unsuspecting buyers.

“The victim buys the car, the tickets-- and the fact that the car was booted,” Beechum said. She advised people planning to buy a used car to check the vehicle’s ticketing status with the DMV.

Beechum said the rise in the ticket collection rate, which nets the city about $1.7 million per year, does more than make up for the headaches that come with pilfered boots.

She added that the fear factor is the main reason why the booting program has been effective.

“The psychological impact is what gets people to respond to paying the fines,” she said. “Having it out there, where everyone in the neighborhood can see. . . . I imagine it’s pretty embarrassing.”