Getting the Boot, L.A.-Style

There are 15 million stories in the Naked Megalopolis. Would that there were that many parking spots. It is possible in this place to find whole neighborhoods so cramped that you could grow old and die waiting for some open stretch of curbside, your keening ghost eternally circling the block.

One such neighborhood lies in the heart of Los Angeles, and it is from that meter maid’s paradise that we bring you today’s cautionary tale. It is the day after Thanksgiving, Mid-Wilshire district, early morning. An old yellow BMW sits outside an apartment house, pathetically immobilized by the big boot on its wheel.

The Beemer belongs to a working mom, a freelance writer who shall remain nameless because, truth be told, her past is checkered when it comes to vehicular fees. She lives on a block where two apartment complexes have gone up in 10 years, each with insufficient parking. Tickets fly like jacaranda petals in springtime. Even obsessive law-abiders fall behind.

And obsessive, this nice woman isn’t. “OK, true, I paid my registration late, but I did have until November to pay it,” she concedes. “And OK, I did have three delinquent parking tickets, but I paid them when I sent the registration in to the DMV.”

True, too, that she had three other outstanding tickets for lapsed registration tags, which, combined with the other citations, put her over the five-ticket-delinquency threshold for official scofflaws. But, see, when she’d sent in that registration payment, her outstanding tickets should have been knocked down to three.

Anyway, day after Thanksgiving, she’s square on the registration, square on all but three of the tickets. She’s supposed to go up north to visit family and there sits her transportation with ’99 tags on its plate and a boot on its wheel. It isn’t illegally parked, and she is no longer a scofflaw (or so she figures), so why is she being punished?

She storms back into her apartment and calls the parking enforcement office, which, due to the holiday weekend, is conveniently closed.

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There’s nothing like a boot to bring out the animal in an Angeleno; for sheer provocation, it’s probably second only to getting towed. Likewise, there’s nothing like a scofflaw to bring out the cop in an L.A. parking enforcement officer. Jimmy Price, who heads the city’s enforcement unit, says his troops boot about 1,500 vehicles a month. Key to the effort is a special detail that trawls the city with a list of the plates and addresses of known scofflaws.

It was this detail, in its hallmark white van, that nailed aforementioned Scofflaw Mom, and this detail that she spotted on her street later that night. She grabbed her 4-year-old son and ran out calling, “What are you doing?” Boot in hand, they replied, “Searching for scofflaws, ma’am.”

So she laid it out: how she’d been booted for tickets she’d already paid, how her late registration wasn’t late anymore. How, when she tried to rectify matters, she was told that the city was open for booting on holidays, but closed when it came to removing said boots. How it was all right here in her paperwork.

Sorry, they told her, prompting her to demand an explanation, prompting one of the officers to suggest she not scream in front of her kid. Call the police if you have a problem, they told her. “I said, ‘I did call the police,’ ” she recalled, “ ‘and the police said you guys are ill-trained morons.’ And the guy said, ‘And that, lady, is why I’m not removing that boot. Good night.’ ”

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Days later, she learned the rest of the story: Turns out scofflaws run a risk when they pay off tickets via the DMV. According to the city’s traffic adjudication office, there’s lag time of up to six weeks between the time you pay the DMV and the time the money gets to the city where you’ve committed your violation. If you don’t notify the city involved that the check is in the mail, the delinquent ticket won’t be cleared.

Bob Lewis, chief of L.A.’s parking research and support bureau, says that the city has mitigated the gap by setting up a system that allows traffic enforcement people to check DMV records via computer, just to eliminate the possibility they’ve paid that way, before whipping out the boot. But Sgt. Oscar Martin, a booting supervisor for the city, says that system only works during business hours. After dark and on weekends and holidays, all bets are off.

Which returns us to Scofflaw Mom, who is appealing her case, and to the good bureaucrats, who have a different appeal. “It’s really easy to avoid boots,” Lewis offers. “Just pay your tickets before you get five of them. Really. It works.”

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.