Parking Ticket Violators May Get ‘the Boot’

The crew in the dirty white van crept slowly up to the maroon Honda Civic parked on Lucile Avenue in Silver Lake. The car’s tires were small -- the perfect size for a small “Rhino” boot.

A few minutes later, the van pulled alongside a gray Nissan Maxima on Van Ness Avenue in the Wilshire Center neighborhood. For this job, the large Rhino boot was the right fit.

The van was driven by members of Los Angeles’ Habitual Parking Violators Unit, a crew of street-hardened traffic enforcement officers who clamp down on parking scofflaws by incapacitating their vehicles with large wheel locks known as boots.

The small and large Rhino locks are just two of a handful of heavy, metal boots the city uses as a not-so-subtle reminder to motorists to pay their tickets.

The officers are also armed with the Helix and Palma boots. The brightly colored locks -- named for the boot manufacturers -- come in various sizes and designs. It’s not a one-boot-fits-all situation.

The use of this assortment of boots is an example of how the Habitual Parking Violators Unit -- now in its 15th year in Los Angeles -- has honed its tactics to more effectively bring problem parkers to justice.

A few years ago, the unit also replaced slower, bulky computers in the patrol vans with new high-speed laptop computers that allow crews to check the number of parking tickets on a dozen cars at a time.

The efforts have paid off. The unit of 14 vans, each operated by two officers, install up to 90 boots a day -- more than twice as many as when the program was launched in 1987. Once a car is booted, the owner has 72 hours to pay the outstanding tickets before the city tows it away.

The fear of being booted has apparently persuaded many Angelenos to be more diligent about paying overdue tickets. When the unit was created, about 65,000 vehicles had five or more outstanding parking tickets, making them eligible for the boot. Today, fewer than 30,000 vehicles are eligible for the boot.

The booting vans are deployed out of a poorly lighted parking structure in Hollywood known to traffic officers as “the bat cave.” Like the caped crusader Batman, half of the crews work under cover of darkness, cruising the city’s 6,400 miles of streets from 2 to 7 a.m.

While one officer drives, the other quickly punches license plate numbers into the laptop. When the computer responds with the message “BOOT ELIGIBLE,” the officers jump out, grab a boot -- each weighs about 35 pounds -- and get to work.

Traffic Enforcement Officer Joann Maciorowski has been booting cars for 12 years, and can usually tell by a car’s make and model which boot fits best.

For example, she said the large Rhino locks on tight to those beefy SUV tires. The smaller Palma boot fits snug on small tires without hubcaps. Parking officials have even modified a large Rhino to slide flat along the ground and lock on the wheels of pavement-hugging low-riders and Corvettes.

Getting a boot that fits snug is crucial. Some people will try anything to free their cars from the boot’s metal jaws. Motorists have tried to beat, kick, cut and burn the boots off. “Police at the 77th Street Division drove up on a guy hammering away at a boot,” Maciorowski said.

Sometimes the motorists are successful. Recently, traffic enforcement officers came across a Rhino boot, locked onto a flattened tire in the empty parking spot where a car had been booted. The owner apparently let the air out of the tire, providing just enough room to squeeze a wrench under the boot to remove the lug nuts.

But each boot is valued at more than $500, and removing or damaging one is a felony. Last year, the city prosecuted at least 30 people for such a crime.

If they can’t get the boots off, some people will soil them with paint or urine. That is one of the reasons Traffic Enforcement Officer Albert Lilly wears gloves when he handles the boots.

But these are minor offenses compared with the insults Lilly and other officers routinely endure when motorists catch them booting their car. “Their first reaction is shock,” Lilly said. “Then they start to scream and yell.”

Traffic Enforcement Sgt. John Curtin, who oversees the booting unit, said his officers are trained to be courteous -- to a certain point. If a motorist becomes belligerent, he said, the officers are not obliged to hang around after the boot has been locked on. “It’s called the 15-second attitude test,” Curtin said.

He and other traffic enforcement officers say motorists have used just about every excuse to keep their cars boot-free. But the officers can instantly verify the excuses with the laptop computers, which are constantly updated on the status of each parking ticket. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the presidential motorcade,” Curtin said. “If it comes up on the computer, we will boot it.”

When phony excuses and curses fail, some car owners get violent. Most traffic officers are armed with pepper spray and a direct radio link to the police.

Lilly is a brawny man who spent 20 years in the Navy before he became a traffic enforcement officer. But that did not dissuade a petite South Los Angeles woman from attacking him a couple of months ago as he was putting a boot on her car.

“I was just tightening up the boot when this woman caught us by surprise and jumped on my back,” he said. “She was just screaming and yelling, saying we were not going to boot her car.”

Lilly stood up, shrugged the woman off, finished clamping the boot on and called the police.

“It’s not worth it to fight with them,” he said. “My goal is to go home at night.”

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