Next Time You’re at a Meter, Park That Idea of Skipping Off
At 4:55 p.m. on may 5, 1999, a certain officer Fiorito of the municipal police of Assisi, Italy, was motoring down the narrow Borgo Aretino when he (or she) spotted my rented Opel parked where it shouldn’t have been. Officer Fiorito wrote a citation, tucked it beneath a windshield wiper and went on his (or her) way.
When I got back to my car after visiting the town’s famous churches, I discovered Officer Fiorito’s handiwork. I shook my head at the incongruity of standing on that ancient stone street in the hometown of St. Francis with a parking ticket in my hand.
I threw the thing away. Just let the Polizia Municipale of Assisi try to find me in L.A. What was their quaint little ticket to me, a resident of a city where the war on heedless parkers is fought with the intensity of a jihad?
Angelenos, we know from parking tickets. In fiscal year 1998-’99, drivers paid an astonishing $114 million in parking fines to the city. After expenses, the city’s general fund had gained $91.2 million, a new record.
That year, city traffic officers wrote 3.2 million tickets, 23% more than they had five years before. Moreover, among big cities, L.A. is one of the best at collecting on the citations. City parking administrator James Sherman says that within three years of issuance, about 80% of parking fines are paid.
Precise comparative statistics are difficult to come by, but L.A. likely ranks second only to New York City, which in the same fiscal year issued 8.9 million tickets and took in $373 million in fines. San Francisco, another city famously murderous on illegal parkers, collected $57.3 million on 2.2 million citations.
A local soldier in this war is Sergio Camacho, one of 520 L.A. Department of Transportation traffic officers. He is a genial, thickly built man of 27, the husband of an elementary school teacher, the father of an 8-year-old girl and a one-year veteran of the job.
Hunting quarry in his dreaded little white traffic enforcement sedan, he works his chewing gum with a smile and bobs his head to oldies rock. He is expert at detecting the often obscure red window tinting, the indication that time has expired on an electronic parking meter (all of the city’s 42,000 parking meters have gone electronic, by the way).
“See that one?” he asks. “Boom.” He pulls his car in front of an old red Camaro parked on Yucca near Vine in Hollywood.
Standing alongside the offending auto, he enters its license number and other pertinent information into his computerized summons writer, called a “hand-held,” and presses a button. A $30 citation curls from a small, wireless printer on his belt. Camacho puts the slip of paper into an envelope, which he traps beneath the driver’s-side windshield wiper. The whole process has taken 45 seconds.
Over the next hour, Camacho will tag eight more vehicles for meter violations and one pickup truck for parking on a sidewalk. Hollywood is the most productive of the five parking enforcement areas in the city. In February alone, officers in Hollywood issued 74,462 citations, or “cites.” If your car is illegally parked there for at least seven minutes, you’re almost certain to be nailed.
“People think we’re vultures but we’re not,” Camacho says. “For me a good day isn’t writing a lot of cites. A good day is a safe day. It’s about treating citizens well and them treating me well. Then I know I did a good job.”
Camacho and his comrades are instructed to be courteous to citizens, to be explanatory, to let them vent if they need to. And he doesn’t mind letting citizens in on a few fine points, to wit:
- If your meter has expired but you are present, you will be given a chance to put more money in and not be cited.
- The ticket is a done deal, your ardent pleas notwithstanding, once your license plate number has been entered in a hand-held.
- Getting a ticket doesn’t mean you can park free for the rest of the day. One hour after being ticketed in a one-hour zone, or two in a two-hour zone, you can be ticketed again.
- If your car is parked in a five-minute passenger loading zone and no one is in the car dropping off or taking on passengers, you can be cited.
- If you see an officer go by and you think you can safely park illegally for a time, you’re wrong. Every beat has multiple, overlapping officers patrolling it.
Camacho has a lot more technology and methodology going for him than the ballpoint pen-scrawling Officer Fiorito of Assisi. But none of this breed is to be taken lightly.
More than six months after my vacation in Italy, I received notice that a registered letter awaited me at the post office. Retrieving it, I saw that it was from the Italian consulate in Los Angeles.
I opened the envelope. There was Officer Fiorito’s ticket.
He (or she) had tracked me down through the rental car company. He (or she) had misspelled my name (“Jamese Ricci”) and had gotten my address slightly wrong, but I had to admire Officer Fiorito’s tenacity.
Can anybody lend me 89,300 lire till payday?
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James Ricci’s e-mail address is james.ricci@latimes.com
