It's weirdly both such a big number and such a small number.
15k is a ton for many people and probably well more than the inconvenience this one guy suffered.
But it's insubstantial compared to the cost of this case turning into a class action and getting the city to actually have to change something, and it sounds like it's insubstantial compared to the total harm of this program. Especially cases like the woman who was nearly arrested.
Sounds like it was too small at the end of the day. 2 people accepted and 2 others are proceeding with class action suit. They failed in their goal of snuffing out the class action suit. Maybe $30k would have been enough. Though that might have attracted new litigants.
Clearly a lose lose for Philly, which is not surprising with such a shit show of a policy.
The idea of a courtesy tow is such a violation of justice where the government can dole out a punishment worse than the law allows without a trial. The police are effectively the judge jury and executioner. They find you guilty of some law, sentence you to the punishment of finding your car and any consequences of it being there, and execute it by hiding it. This is one of those weird circumstances where I would rather just be charged with a crime.
> Henin was placed in handcuffs because police in New Jersey thought the car was stolen. That was because, months earlier, the car had been courtesy towed in West Philly, and she reported it stolen as police advised. Henin followed up with Philadelphia police when she later found her car, but they mistakenly left it in the stolen-vehicle database.
It could be the argument for a sitcom. Not funny in real life when police is pointing a gun at you.
I think I’ve seen this kind of farce happen often enough in sitcoms. Odd Couple “My Strife In Court”, Seinfeld “The Parking Garage”, The Golden Girls “Ladies of the Evening”. People are always getting arrested in sitcoms for dumb reasons.
The quote from the police chief implies she was arrested (though it's in brackets, so it could just be sloppy reporting):
> “My sergeant on the scene received information from Philly PD, who said, ‘Go ahead. Lock her up. It’s [a] good [arrest],’” Long Beach Township Police Chief Anthony Deely said in 2020.
So they even approached her at gun point. And the initial tow and police report was due to police stupidity.
Now I don’t want to profile people, but she looks like a regular person and she reports her height as 4ft 11. At what point did the police feel threatened enough to draw weapons?
For a reported stolen car/felony stop, it seems pretty reasonable that they'd handcuff the driver before checking the driver's license and discovering it matches the registration.
Cops generally determine the risk of a suspect by the severity of a crime. A felony crime is considered a significant crime.
But regardless, cops put cuffs on everyone they arrest. The point being that they don’t know who is going to fight you to get away. People will fight to escape over the dumbest things.
It’s not really a huge injustice to sit in cuffs for a couple minutes while cops verify wtf is going on. I’m the first to criticize the cops but this isn’t really that kind of situation.
If I reported my car stolen, I would expect the cops to have a reasonable assumption that the person they find it with could be the thief.
Years ago, I was pulled over while driving a rental car that had been reported stolen by an earlier renter a few weeks prior. I'm certainly glad that the officers in Atlanta approached the situation professionally and without any cuffs involved.
No. And the rental agency seemed pretty blameless in the whole situation. A previous renter had reported the car stolen, but then found the car not long after. It turns out that anyone can report a car stolen, but only the owner can report it un-stolen, and I'm guessing the previous renter somehow forgot to mention the whole affair to the rental agency.
The rental agency ended up giving me a free rental and a credit for another free day or something on a future rental.
After reading the article but before reading the comments, I thought to myself, people will defend all manner of awful things, even when they’re this clear cut. Sure wish I’d been wrong.
Being forcibly detained is traumatic. Especially when you know you’re being detained wrongly. I’m speaking from experience here, and as someone who has received a settlement in a wrongful arrest suit.
There’s nothing reasonable about armed officers of the state putting someone in handcuffs without any prior effort to ascertain the appropriateness of that person being in handcuffs. Asking for license and registration is routine. If anything after that suggests they have actually stopped a car thief, the next appropriate action might be to forcibly detain them. It might also be more appropriate to question them further without force.
Putting a car’s rightful owner in handcuffs because their car had been towed without their knowledge, and they understandably reported it stolen when it wasn’t where they’d left it, and then they had the temerity to drive their own car after it had been recovered, is cruel. All of the prior facts would already be unbelievably stressful for most people. And of course no random cop is gonna know all of those prior facts, but that’s why they should ask questions before acting.
Let me reiterate: being forced into constraints by armed agents of the state who have broad authority, and get broad allowance, to use their monopoly on violence is terrifying. It’s even more terrifying when you know you’ve done nothing to warrant it, and especially when you’re being treated that way because of other wrongs done to you.
After I posted my comment above, I had to calm myself because I had a spike of anxiety remembering the details of my own experiences with police aggression, and the memory takes me far away from my body into a place of distilled fear. I’m remembering more as I type this.
I think the word you’re looking for is “comprehend”. I do comprehend why police act aggressively without cause or warning. I don’t think it’s benign. I do think you’re very fortunate not to know that.
I’ve been detained, pushed down onto the trunk of the cruiser, handcuffed behind my back, patted down, put in the back, backup called, investigated, and released on the scene. The cop had a fairly reasonable reason to do what they did that turned out to be based on a false premise [I "matched the description" but wasn't the guy], I complied, and 15-20 minutes of my life was wasted.
Was it awesome? Nope. Do I get that cops aren’t clairvoyant or omniscient and sometimes people get put in and then taken out of cuffs without being arrested? Yup.
Please stop and ask yourself if you’re engaging in a harmful way, or if you could be more considerate about how other people experience police confrontations. My anxiety is through the roof from this interaction. I’m reliving physical and psychological trauma I don’t often revisit, including being bludgeoned while trying to get people to safety away from police and having guns drawn on me for asking about the safety of others.
I’m far from the most vulnerable to police abuse. If it’s affected me this much, I have no reason to doubt how much it’s affected people who are more vulnerable. If having my relatively mild experience so callously dismissed feels like being left on my own to suffer whatever trauma I remember, I can’t imagine how it feels for people who experience police violence alone.
No. I don’t give the police the benefit of the doubt. And you won’t convince me to by dismissing my relatively minor traumatic experience and expecting me to extend that dismissal to people who have much worse experiences.
Their less traumatic experience is valid. I never said it wasn’t. I self edited and rewrote before commenting so many times trying not to misstep here that my more emphatic direct validation apparently didn’t make it in but I’m emphatically glad they haven’t been so traumatized.
That it’s equally valid doesn’t necessarily mean it’s equally important. My experience is less important speaking to how traumatic police encounters are, than experiences of people who’ve experienced worse trauma. It’s just as valid that I don’t share their trauma too.
The world doesn’t owe me anything. It’s a rock hurtling through space that has an unusual concentration of life on it. No one here owes me any consideration at all, “foam padding” or otherwise. But I don’t owe anyone a failure to advocate for myself, either. And I don’t owe anyone a failure to articulate when I think an attitude or argument is harmful or selfish, nor a failure to try to appeal to their better intentions.
I shared my less intense experience because it better matched the experience of the subject of the article. They were detained, cuffed, investigated, and released. It was inconvenient.
Your much more severe interaction which included bludgeoning is totally valid but not a direct analog to her (and my) much less severe interaction.
I’m sorry if my words caused you harm. (That’s meant genuinely, as tone cannot be conveyed in text reliably.)
The state's monopoly, qua Max Weber, is on the legitimate use of violence. That is, the right and legitimacy of that right, is restricted to the state.
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
The article mentions two women who had each reported their cars stolen after the "courtesy" tow which makes one wonder -- _is_ this theft? If not, why? Does it matter if it's done by a private towing company?
No, the asset is being moved, not retained by the mover, and it's ostensibly being done for the public good (edit: see the link further down the thread for why this matters). If _eminent domain_ isn't theft, this definitely isn't.
> Does it matter if it's done by a private towing company?
> No, the asset is being moved, not retained by the mover
I don't get this argument. If I take something which doesn't belong to me, say from a store, and move it two blocks away and put it down, I would still be stealing right? Is the perpetrator required to 'retain' something for it to be theft? If I'm caught while stealing and drop the item, "I just moved it without the owners consent" probably isn't going to cover me.
> If _eminent domain_ isn't theft, this definitely isn't.
Clearly I'm not especially acquainted with the law, but when the government exercises eminent domain doesn't it have to go through some legal process? And my understanding is that owners must be compensated for the property that is taken under eminent domain.
As a followup on the "ostensibly being done for the public good" part, the article describes the courtesy towing practice in a way that sounds like it's sometimes for private uses: "moves vehicles from legal parking spots for special events, construction or emergencies". I have to assume that the organizers of those special events or the firms involved with that construction have paid for some permit which is meant to give them exclusive use of the street parking, in which case it sounds like the public good is only indirectly from the revenue from those permits. Apparently the ability of municipal governments to exercise eminent domain solely for the purpose of increasing its revenue was only established by a court case in 2005. So in 2004 would you have agreed that courtesy towing for a private special event or private construction project was possibly theft? Or at least possibly a 5th amendment violation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
Thank you for highlighting the key distinction and referencing a source with more information.
> although good luck convincing anyone that you lacked such intent
So it sounds like in the courtesy towing context, the city claims that it doesn't have any intent to deprive people of the use of their property, but it's behaving in a way which a reasonable person would totally anticipate would lead to people being unable to use their property (by dropping vehicles in locations which are never communicated to the owner).
Sorry, I should have been more clear: it often isn't "theft" (or "larceny"), legally speaking, but it usually is some lesser crime under a name like "unauthorized use/borrowing" or "misappropriation".
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction that doesn't have a law that covers unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, so I can practically guarantee it is illegal.
That's what I was thinking. I'm sure a good lawyer could argue that, if they have a reasonable way of informing the owner, but they don't do so, they are in fact intending to deprive them of the vehicle.
I think a better example than eminent domain would be civil asset forfeiture (at least as practiced in the US). Although I guess a lot of people would say that is theft.
But if a private individual did that, surely you would consider it theft? So where's the line, why's it OK for a private company but not a private individual? If I'm self employed and registered as my own company, can I do it then?
The private company versus individual has nothing to do with it. The private company / individual is acting on behalf of the state, and the state provides itself the authority to take your property without your consent.
Here in Sweden it would have been a theft-adjacent crime which is translated into English as 'criminal conversion', and it seems that criminal conversion fits.
A crime where someone does something to somebody's property without intending to actually take the property, or not to take it permanently.
Not being familiar with this jurisdiction I can't say whether that's the actual law though. Depending on how it's defined it could easily be theft.
No it can't be theft in a legal sense, since it's legal per statute. And no it doesn't matter if it's a private towing company as long as it's acting on behalf of the state (which it is/was).
But what the plaintiffs are arguing is that it's failing due process at the constitutional level, which to perhaps oversimplify means the city isn't being responsible/fair with its law.
Nobody disputes it has the right to move vehicles for legitimate reasons (which these seem to be), but obviously it ought to be able to track where it moved them to and ensure it's not leading to fines and/or damage without recompense -- which it is clearly not doing. Their lawyers know the city isn't following due process, which is why the city is offering these payouts.
I grew up in NYC, and have a certain immunity to deal with aloof, hostile or otherwise obnoxious city officials. I’ve been to Philly on business and pleasure a few times and… forget it, it’s a whole other level. One wedding, literally 30% of the guest had a ticket, tow or other drama.
PPA is somehow simultaneously notorious for overzealously ticketing and for completely ignoring cars parked in crosswalks, bike lanes, sidewalks, etc. It’s the most bizarrely inconsistent government agency.
So it sounds like car towing is outsourced to some kind of bounty hunting operation of private companies and no one know their arse from their elbow about where cars are moved. Pretty stupid. It would be easy to fix even with pen, paper and phones. But there should be a signed paper trail about the move.
And dropping the cars off in illegal spots, well the fine should go to the “driver” not the car.
I guess they are too lazy to
change this or it is profiting someone personally?
> Problem is, the city doesn’t have a modern, reliable way to track the vehicles’ new locations, leaving owners wandering the streets for days or weeks, looking for their cars.
They could do vastly better than the status quo with century-old multi-part paper form technology. "White Copy - Central PD Tow Office", "Yellow Copy - Precinct PD Tow Clerk", "Pink Copy - DMV, to mail to vehicle owner", ...
This kind of worse-than-brain-dead sh*t-show is why so many people emotionally identify with "the government is the problem", "de-fund the police", and similar slogans.
> This kind of worse-than-brain-dead sh*t-show is why so many people emotionally identify with "the government is the problem", "de-fund the police", and similar slogans.
Those people are right. That is not just emotional, that is rational - that is the only sane attitude towards the fact that these groups with the power of violence over society are so incompetent or even malicious.
Us people have some nuance and quite a bit of disagreement amongst ourselves. Personally I’m all in on defunding the police, but (I still feel weird saying this even after almost six years as a former anarchist) I don’t believe the government is inherently the problem, even if this particular implementation of it is obviously a problem.
Another version of government could and should use its power to prevent these kinds of abuses rather than enable and benefit from them. But that form of government would look radically different from the one we have.
Prevent who from doing these abuses? I only seem to have these types of problems with the government. I have been illegally towed before. I got a letter from the IRS a few months back saying I owe another $1000 of taxes for reasons I can't understand. The letter says call a phone number if you don't understand. I have called it at least 50 times and it always gives me a recording that they can't take my call now. I will probably just have to pay. Only the government can do this to me because they are the only organization I have to obey.
I think the article misstates this. They’re normally legal spots, but at the time of the special event, they’re not legal.(Usually temporary signs are placed a day or two in advance.)
Even if it is, that’s not sufficient to inform car owners to move their vehicles. Where I live, all public parking (whether you have a parking permit or park in spots which don’t require one) has a 72 hour limit. If you put up temporary No Parking signs with less than 72 hours notice, you’re guaranteeing many people will have their cars towed inappropriately.
You get paid a fixed salary and can’t make a penny more until your union-negotiated contract says you can (more years of labor). You basically can’t get fired. Your job never changes and you can’t improve your job. You do the same thing day in and day out waiting for retirement.
So you can screw with some people, maybe get a bribe to help them. It isn’t unreasonable to see why government employees are unhelpful - the system is dumb, wasteful, and nothing they do can fix it, and leaving the job means they will never have it as cushy again.
Can you point to any bribery for common, "retail" interactions with local governments? Outside the south? I'm actually curious, I didn't think most of the country was that far gone yet.
I can think of a spec for a simple application that would fix all the problems associated with "courtesy [sic] towing". However, it also seems pretty clear that any city government that would engage in "courtesy [sic] towing" probably has zero interest in fixing it.
A similar thing happened to my wife and me during a vacation. We had reserved a car via Enterprise Car Share (like Zipcar). When we arrived to the designated car share space, the car was missing.
We called Enterprise who said the car had been properly returned by the previous customer days before, so it should be there. They paid for us to get an Uber to another available car, so we were only delayed and hour or so.
They did follow up with us and it turned out that the city had done a "courtesy tow" because the car was parked on a parade route the previous day. I'm not sure how they eventually found it, but they said that they couldn't activate the GPS tracking without delay and lots of approvals because of customer privacy issues.
It's good if they can't restrict activating GPS because of customer privacy issues but I would think the time between one customer returning it and the next customer picking it up ought to be fair game?
That would be the case if you thought it all the way through and the manager had discretion, but what probably happened was that the company had a blanket policy of "no activating GPS trackers without director approval" that prevented that from occurring.
> That’s the Philly euphemism for what is formally known as “relocation towing” — when the police department, Philadelphia Parking Authority, or a private towing company moves vehicles from legal parking spots for special events, construction or emergencies.
I can see needing to move a vehicle in an emergency, but for special events and construction this shouldn't be needed in most cases. The city knows months in advance the date on which the streets need to be clear. They should plaster the neighborhood in warning notices a month before the event, then go through again the night before to check for stragglers who'd forgotten.
If people seriously end up thinking their car got stolen, there's a massive failure of communication. My thought should be "oops, I forgot about the event", not "where the hell is my car?!"
The "posted signs" thing is an unimpressive solution in 2022 imho and they should really email you or text you "hey move your car please" etc.
As a thought experiment, imagine that the city government was motivated to find a car's owner for some reason, perhaps as a suspect or witness of a serious crime etc. Meaning if they have your plate number and think you're a murderer, they will definitely find you and communicate with you (the message that they communicate will be "come to the police station").
I claim this is a proof by construction that they could communicate with you by some method other than posted signs, if they actually wanted to. And they just choose to do the laziest possible "post signs" solution because of basically incompetence/laziness, not because there's no other way for them to identify and communicate with a car's owner.
In my city at least the weekly street cleaning requires you to move your car weekly. So signs posted a week ahead are typically not as bad. Though the police did once us my apartment buzzer to tell me to move my car, it didn’t always happen (I’ve been towed twice in my 2 decades in the city)..
Also when they tow you it’s to a lot, they don’t just dump you on some other street like in Philly.
That said, it still seems helpful to know immediately as you're getting the space what the timeframe is for leaving. If the're going to start clearing the street in an hour, I'll probably park elsewhere right off the bat and not wait for an email.
How is the city supposed to know my cell phone number or email? I don't generally give them out. I give out my landline whenever I have to give out a phone number. And heck, there are plenty of people in a big city like Philly that don't have a cell phone, too. (And yes, some of them have cars, believe it or not.) Plus cell phones break, emails get sent to spam, etc. Putting a sign up at the place where you are likely to do the illegal thing seems pretty sensible to me.
Maybe the spaces are posted as reserved, and "relocation towing" is what happens if you're still parked there at the reserved time.
In theory if the city had its act together and had a way to let you know where your car had been put (and a process to ensure it's not placed somewhere you'll get ticketed), this is a much fairer option than carting cars off to an impound lot, which are privately run and generally notoriously bad in terms of hours / fees / ease of retrieving your car.
As someone relatively new to Philly, I am not at all surprised by the need for relocation towing. In the immediate Philadelphia metro area, but outside center city parking is extremely sparse. It's not uncommon for me to help squeeze neighbors into barely large enough parallel parking spots (by waving them in) at midnight. Some of these folks live more than 6 blocks away and purportedly were looking for parking after getting off work for an hour or longer.
Philadelphia is also the first place I have lived where parking in the center median of major thoroughfares is normal:
Speaking of, I live a block off South Broad Street (most of the images in the link) and not too long ago there was a marathon that required clearing of that street of all parked cars for its entire length. It _was_ well communicated, well in advance but you can imagine that if parking is tight when the street side parking _and_ the center median is chalk full of cars, relocating is difficult. I don't know if any cars were relocation towed, but I know the night before the event I still saw some cars parked on Broad.
I still think there are communications issues, the city should have a way for owners to find their car. But I also think it's a bit more complex than your first take. Communication is hard and at the scale of Philadelphia I am not too surprised that there are cases where things can go awry between all the various bureaucracies you have to interact with in something like this. I also think it's pretty reasonable that the lawsuit is looking to force improvements, not do away with the system.
Was this comment written by GPT-3, or is it just contrarian for contrarianism's sake? Posted signs stating parking restrictions is the standard way of communicating parking restrictions, temporary or permanent. The notice window doesn't even have to be that long, although it's nice for it to be so that people can plan ahead. For example, in Boston it is illegal to stay parked in the same spot for more than 72 hours, so the city puts up signs at least 3 days ahead of time. If a car is still parked somewhere, it has either violated the temporary restriction or the 72 hour rule. Also if a car is towed, it's towed to a city lot rather than a random street. Getting your car out of a tow lot sucks but at least it's predictable. Problem solved - there is nothing "complex" about this.
In Philly, residents can get permits to park near their home for an unlimited time. So you could leave for a week's vacation and have your car "courtesy towed" from right outside your house by the time you got back even with 72 hours notice.
The applications for those permits seem like an opportune time to collect an email/phone to send neighborhood notices to, and layout out expectations for the minimum time for those notices. I'm all for better ways of contacting vehicle owners. Posted notices are just a good first pass to contrast with the current insanity.
This makes me incurably angry as longtime resident of South Philly. You sound like your head is in the clouds to a local. Why? Because our city operates roughly above the 3rd world level.
Nobody puts signs up
Nobody gives notice
Nobody gives a good God dammed.
Park where you can, hope your car is there tomorrow, hope there isn't a gas leak, road collapse or towed randomly
Its so absurd we had a TV show called Parking Wars.
I was courtesy towed last week. I spend a year backing down a narrow (one car width) alley because we had a pothole the size of Alaska. I pushed an abandoned car onto broad street during rush hour to get it towed after 6 months. I had my car towed because of a local celebrity funeral. All my tires were slashed during the BLM riots. My friends car was flipped at the Phillies parade, anothwrs at the eagles rally. I've gotten hit with a baseball bat for asking someone to move their car.
Welcome to hell
Edit: did I mention our parking "authority" is extremely predatory, run as a nepotism program for local Republicans, siphons money from the city and has been routinely found to be absolutely kafkaesque. So bad they actually had their own petty court removed for being a essentially kangaroo court?
I don't know why my comment would make you angry. I'm not saying "everything is fine", rather pointing out how it works in other cities, as an example of some sanity to push for. The comment I was responding to was full of handwavey reasons why any sort of change would be too complicated, essentially justifying the status quo. I would think that if you wanted reform, that is the type of thing what would make you angry.
It makes me angry in the same way a kid from Kentucky may say "why don't the Palestinians and Jews just get along ".
There's a whole history with parking here.
Yes, if our city was even one iota of a normal place we would expect these things. Instead we drop our pants and bend over because, well actually I don't know why we do, Stockholm syndrome?
I mean sure, but we're talking about a government agency that should theoretically answer to the people, whether through the democratic process, or (as in the article) eventually through the courts. Also as bad as they apparently are, I wouldn't think the parking deputies are holding a grudge against residents for filling the streets or something. Rather they're just motivated by money/expedience, and constrained by what they can get away with.
My car got towed while I was on a trip during that race a few years ago when I lived off of South Broad Street (:
I was parked in the middle of Broad and Snyder (in this section of South Philly it’s acceptable to park illegally in the middle of the street) because I couldn’t find another spot and had a flight to catch.
Came back a week later, car gone. Walked around for a couple hours then approached a cop parked nearby. After quite a bit of back and forth on the radio he told me my car was parked over 20 blocks away, curtesy tow.
Another time I parked on a Thursday, slept through a hangover on Saturday and missed the police posting for a street festival. That was some ordeal getting it back on Sunday. Took a couple hours and I think $250 or so.
> They should plaster the neighborhood in warning notices a month before the event
I grew up in Seattle but lived in Philly for 2 years and this was one of the strangest things to me. In many cases they don't post _any notices at all._
I knew enough people who got "courtesy" towed with no records that I added a GPS tracker to our car to make sure I could find it.
Seattle, for anyone who hasn't lived there, has a set of folding barricades marked 'No Parking' with a blank space to put dates and times. I believe you can even go to the city and borrow a set yourself for things like sidewalk repairs, taking down a tree, moving vans, or having a forklift show up to move something into your yard, though these seem to go out pretty close to the event whereas I saw city ones show up two weeks before something major.
From a smaller data sample, parts of Oregon also do this as well.
It's a pretty normal thing here in Massachusetts that you can get some placards to post on the street for when people are bringing in moving vans and whatnot. I believe you get these from the town you live in.
> They should plaster the neighborhood in warning notices a month before the event, then go through again the night before to check for stragglers who'd forgotten.
On-street parking is an absurd concept in itself. There are no other social equivalents where you can occupy a general public-use space for free (!) for several days (!) without facing some form of consequences.
The side of the street is hardly general public-use. In most places it's explicitly for parking. And many (certainly almost all where I am, albeit not in a major city) parking lots don't enforce time limits or ensure you're there for some specific use of the space.
Cities don't necessarily know if construction is going to happen a month in advance. Plans can change, so they have windows, sometimes decently large (months) windows to do the work.
Something similar happened to me where my car was towed to the yard (law says it should've been relocated iirc) for being parked in a construction zone while I was on vacation. When I got back I didn't check on my car for a few days and when I finally went to my car, I found it was towed and that I needed to pay $800 to get my car out. Thing is -- the permits for the construction on that day were canceled. So they did construction without a permit.
So when I attempted to contest it in court, I was pulled aside by the city's legal staff and told that they were throwing out the tickets, fines, and storage fees because they... didn't have enough information on the tickets. The judge signed the release and I had my car two hours later.
It's hard to give any ounce of good faith to these systems when they do things like not tell you they're throwing the tickets out before the court date, nor do they have any semblance of automation to find those sorts of ticket gaps. For me, I was able to take a couple days off of work to do research and go to court, but that's not the case for so many people.
This happened to me last year on my own property in my own parking space, and my landlord refused to tell me for weeks and weeks who towed my car, and then refused to pay the fee.
I want to sue (towing fees became larger than what I put into the car) but I have no idea how to proceed? I don't have a family to depend on for this kind of advice. The market has been so insane since that I still haven't purchased a new car.
Open to any advice about how to not let these bastards win. My car was straight stolen from my parking spot, with everything inside.
Call your state bar association and get a referral for a local attorney, a lot of state bar associations offer 30 minute consultations for >$50, and at the very least give you advise on how to proceed. A lot of times a demand letter sent from a lawyer is enough to get them to release the car and waive whatever bogus fees they're charging, and if not off to small claims court, where again they can advise you how to proceed or even handle it themselves if you'd like.
Thank you! I wish I'd received this advice when it happened. In general the state bar association is a good first-stop if I'm not sure what to do next in situations like this?
Absolutely, they can direct you to the right kind of lawyer for whatever situation you find yourself in, and honestly with something that's often incredibly location specific like parking and/or towing laws it's usually more than worth it to just get a professional involved instead of spending hours of your time researching and doing things yourself, when $100 for an hour of their time to draft and send a demand letter will accomplish the same thing.
Ah yes, reminded me of when my motorcycle was parked near 7th and South St. There was construction I guess, and my motorcycle was apparently courtesy lifted to the sidewalk. I returned from vacation to ~$700 of tickets for the bike being on the sidewalk.
Reminds me of when my motorcycle was towed from my apartment complex. It was held by a private towing company, but for some reason the city suspected the bike was stolen, so the tow lot (allegedly) couldn't release it until the city completed their 'investigation'. Meanwhile I was on the hook for every day that it sat in the tow yard (not to mention the rental car to get to work), but powerless to get it out. Eventually the city cleared it and I owed like 2k. I desperately wish I fought it but for some reason I just paid it...
I fought it which basically entailed me going to some city government building and showing the guy I was out of town for some of the days and so wasn’t able to keep an eye on my bike. He essentially told me to pound sand and so I ended up paying it. The absurdity tempered the fury.
It's public land used for the purposes of facilitating transportation using private vehicles. If you think about it that way there really isn't anything different between what you described and using public land to provide thoroughfares for private vehicles.
> It's public land used for the purposes of facilitating transportation using private vehicles. If you think about it that way there really isn't anything different between what you described and using public land to provide thoroughfares for private vehicles.
Parked cars are hindering transport for cars and bikes. My street has cars parked on both sides and at times there is only space for travel in one direction. So two thirds of the road width is dedicated to parking and it’s not facilitating transport.
> That’s the Philly euphemism for what is formally known as “relocation towing” — when the police department, Philadelphia Parking Authority, or a private towing company moves vehicles from legal parking spots for special events, construction or emergencies.
> Problem is, the city doesn’t have a modern, reliable way to track the vehicles’ new locations, leaving owners wandering the streets for days or weeks, looking for their cars.
This would normally be the part where I (and probably half the other people reading HN) would say that building a modern, reliable way to track this is not hard. We'd go on to outline something involving a database, probably a mobile app for the tow truck drivers, and probably a web site for car owners. We'd probably say this is a small project that could be done by a handful of developers in a few weeks and would be fairly inexpensive.
Others would then tell us that we are vastly underestimating the difficulties of dealing with the mess that city IT tends to be, and that "fairly inexpensive" would still be expensive enough that there would have to be budget meetings and studies, and maybe the web site would need to support multiple languages, and a ton of other things we've overlooked.
So I'm not going to suggest that a modern, reliable way to track this would be easy.
But why does it have to be modern? What would be wrong with an old-fashioned approach?
Require the tow truck drivers to report the license plate numbers and drop off locations and drop off date/time to the police or perhaps some other government entity which can add the information to a list.
When an owner finds their car missing and contacts the police, the police can check the list and tell the owner where the car is and remove it from that list, and add it to a log of past courtesy tows along with a timestamp.
If the owner finds that their car got ticketed at the new location before they could reasonably retrieve it the log of past courtesy tows could be used to prove that the owner did not park at the new location.
This requires:
1. Tow truck drivers have a way to report the information. Voice or text from their cell phone to a phone number maintained by the police specifically for this would cover that.
2. The police need to maintain a list of these reports. This can be handled by having them copy the information to an index card and file the card alphabetically by license number in a card file.
3. Car owners or police called by car owners need a way to check the list. They can call the same number from #1, and the people that file incoming reports can also handle checking the card file.
4. The police needs to maintain the log. That's another, bigger, card file.
So basically we need a phone line, someone who will answer that phone, a file clerk with enough time to handle these, enough card files to hold the recent records, probably a shelf or two in an office to hold those card files, and a bigger card storage system for the historical log.
They could just enter the license plate and an intersection into a simple database so the PPA could look it up when asked. Using Google Forms would be an adequate solution. It's just not worth their time.
EDIT: or even a picture of their license plate would capture the GPS coordinates in the image file itself. It would be so incredibly simple to at least capture the data.
This occurred to me in the 2000s in NYC. Repeated (I kept on
getting "disconnected") calls to 311 always led to an operator that proceeded to victim blame me. "Are you sure you do not have parking tickets?", "Are you positive you have no parking tickets?".
There were "No Parking xxxday for repaving" that were posted in the (somewhat desolate, few residences) area after I have parked. Even after explaining this situation to the operators, they still insisted that the city must have towed my car because I did not pay my parking tickets. Three/four operators, same line. They had no idea where they towed my car. It took my father and I over an hour, splitting the streets, walking the neighborhood and finding the car.
This happened to me in SF. It was pride parade day, and I parked in a perfectly legal spot. But when I came back a couple of hours later all the cars had been towed and there were a bunch of special event vehicles parked there. The cops had put up a special event no parking notice, but by law that has to be done 48 hours in advance. They didn't tow me to another spot like this, though. Just towed me to impound where I had to pay about $500 to get my car back.
I've been fighting my city over bullshit $50-$110 parking tickets that are intended to curb homeless people living in their cars. That's right, kicking people when they are down. So far, I've won 4 of the tickets and a 5th is pending the process.
The thing is that you have to pay the ticket, then fight it once (they automatically vote against you), then you appeal it, where they take a closer look at things, and then pass judgement in my favor. At times, I'm out hundreds of dollars and it takes 3-6 months for it to all resolve itself.
You have to pay before fighting it? That seems odd to me. The few tickets I received (Maryland and Mississippi) I had the option to pay or to go to court to fight it.
In Finland, if your car gets towed due to, for example, street cleaning, you text a number with your license plate and you get a reply with an approximate location.
The thing that boggles my mind in regard to this is that they don’t take them to an impound lot. In Australia, if your car is towed someone then has custody of it. I guess initially the “courtesy” part is that it’s meant to be easily findable. But it sounds like having a centralised place where you can get your car and you won’t get fined sounds like less effort the the “helpful” solution.
If the local government can’t afford to tow cars to an impound lot and pay those fees, then they can’t afford to have local events. This is simply a case of having your cake and eating it too. Local government wants all the benefits of having events with none of the negatives (like actually planning and being responsible).
I actually don’t understand why there is no system where a note is issued by the tower that informs whoever that this car was moved as part of a courtesy tow and it is not subject to fines. I don’t mean a centralised system, I mean a sticker you can just bang on there. There should also be an option where you could call the DMV and they can “page” the owner to advise them were their car is located if someone is being inconvenienced by an unwanted car that has been towed.
There are so many simple options that won’t fix the issue but at least prevent it from being hellish. The fact that nothing has been done makes me feel like this is actually quite intentional on part of the parking authority for revenue reasons.
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] thread15k is a ton for many people and probably well more than the inconvenience this one guy suffered.
But it's insubstantial compared to the cost of this case turning into a class action and getting the city to actually have to change something, and it sounds like it's insubstantial compared to the total harm of this program. Especially cases like the woman who was nearly arrested.
Clearly a lose lose for Philly, which is not surprising with such a shit show of a policy.
It could be the argument for a sitcom. Not funny in real life when police is pointing a gun at you.
“Oops the dystopian government black bagged the wrong person because of a typo. So sorry! Here’s a check for the inconvenience.”
However, since it was in a different state, perhaps the registration database wasn't available - only the stolen vehicle database was.
> “My sergeant on the scene received information from Philly PD, who said, ‘Go ahead. Lock her up. It’s [a] good [arrest],’” Long Beach Township Police Chief Anthony Deely said in 2020.
https://pressofatlanticcity.com/news/crime/a-philly-police-c...
So they even approached her at gun point. And the initial tow and police report was due to police stupidity.
Now I don’t want to profile people, but she looks like a regular person and she reports her height as 4ft 11. At what point did the police feel threatened enough to draw weapons?
But regardless, cops put cuffs on everyone they arrest. The point being that they don’t know who is going to fight you to get away. People will fight to escape over the dumbest things.
It’s not really a huge injustice to sit in cuffs for a couple minutes while cops verify wtf is going on. I’m the first to criticize the cops but this isn’t really that kind of situation.
If I reported my car stolen, I would expect the cops to have a reasonable assumption that the person they find it with could be the thief.
The rental agency ended up giving me a free rental and a credit for another free day or something on a future rental.
Being forcibly detained is traumatic. Especially when you know you’re being detained wrongly. I’m speaking from experience here, and as someone who has received a settlement in a wrongful arrest suit.
There’s nothing reasonable about armed officers of the state putting someone in handcuffs without any prior effort to ascertain the appropriateness of that person being in handcuffs. Asking for license and registration is routine. If anything after that suggests they have actually stopped a car thief, the next appropriate action might be to forcibly detain them. It might also be more appropriate to question them further without force.
Putting a car’s rightful owner in handcuffs because their car had been towed without their knowledge, and they understandably reported it stolen when it wasn’t where they’d left it, and then they had the temerity to drive their own car after it had been recovered, is cruel. All of the prior facts would already be unbelievably stressful for most people. And of course no random cop is gonna know all of those prior facts, but that’s why they should ask questions before acting.
Let me reiterate: being forced into constraints by armed agents of the state who have broad authority, and get broad allowance, to use their monopoly on violence is terrifying. It’s even more terrifying when you know you’ve done nothing to warrant it, and especially when you’re being treated that way because of other wrongs done to you.
I think the word you’re looking for is “comprehend”. I do comprehend why police act aggressively without cause or warning. I don’t think it’s benign. I do think you’re very fortunate not to know that.
Was it awesome? Nope. Do I get that cops aren’t clairvoyant or omniscient and sometimes people get put in and then taken out of cuffs without being arrested? Yup.
I’m far from the most vulnerable to police abuse. If it’s affected me this much, I have no reason to doubt how much it’s affected people who are more vulnerable. If having my relatively mild experience so callously dismissed feels like being left on my own to suffer whatever trauma I remember, I can’t imagine how it feels for people who experience police violence alone.
No. I don’t give the police the benefit of the doubt. And you won’t convince me to by dismissing my relatively minor traumatic experience and expecting me to extend that dismissal to people who have much worse experiences.
Both seem valid to me. The world doesn’t owe you foam padding at every turn.
That it’s equally valid doesn’t necessarily mean it’s equally important. My experience is less important speaking to how traumatic police encounters are, than experiences of people who’ve experienced worse trauma. It’s just as valid that I don’t share their trauma too.
The world doesn’t owe me anything. It’s a rock hurtling through space that has an unusual concentration of life on it. No one here owes me any consideration at all, “foam padding” or otherwise. But I don’t owe anyone a failure to advocate for myself, either. And I don’t owe anyone a failure to articulate when I think an attitude or argument is harmful or selfish, nor a failure to try to appeal to their better intentions.
Your much more severe interaction which included bludgeoning is totally valid but not a direct analog to her (and my) much less severe interaction.
I’m sorry if my words caused you harm. (That’s meant genuinely, as tone cannot be conveyed in text reliably.)
Absent this, one of three conditions exist;
1. There is no monopoly. In which case violence is widespread, and there is no state.
2. There is no legitimacy. In which case violence is capricious. This is your condition of tyranny (unaccountable power).
3. Some non-state power or agent assumes the monopoly on legitimate violence. In which case it becomes, by definition the State.
The state's claim is to legitimacy. A capricious exercise would be an abrogation of legitimacy
Weber, Max (1978). Roth, Guenther; Wittich, Claus (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: U. California P. p. 54.
<https://archive.org/details/economysociety00webe/page/54/mod...>
There's an excellent explanation of the common misunderstanding in this episode of the Talking Politics podcast: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
The misleading and abbreviated form that's frequently found online seems to have originated with Rothbard in the 1960s, and was further popularised by Nozick in the 1970s. It's now falsely accepted as a truth when in fact it is a gross misrepresentation and obscures the core principles Weber advanced.
No, the asset is being moved, not retained by the mover, and it's ostensibly being done for the public good (edit: see the link further down the thread for why this matters). If _eminent domain_ isn't theft, this definitely isn't.
> Does it matter if it's done by a private towing company?
Not if they're deputized.
I don't get this argument. If I take something which doesn't belong to me, say from a store, and move it two blocks away and put it down, I would still be stealing right? Is the perpetrator required to 'retain' something for it to be theft? If I'm caught while stealing and drop the item, "I just moved it without the owners consent" probably isn't going to cover me.
> If _eminent domain_ isn't theft, this definitely isn't.
Clearly I'm not especially acquainted with the law, but when the government exercises eminent domain doesn't it have to go through some legal process? And my understanding is that owners must be compensated for the property that is taken under eminent domain.
No, not if you don’t intend to deprive the rightful owner of it (although good luck convincing anyone that you lacked such intent).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/theft
> Theft is the taking of another person’s personal property with the intent of depriving that person of the use of their property
> although good luck convincing anyone that you lacked such intent
So it sounds like in the courtesy towing context, the city claims that it doesn't have any intent to deprive people of the use of their property, but it's behaving in a way which a reasonable person would totally anticipate would lead to people being unable to use their property (by dropping vehicles in locations which are never communicated to the owner).
The actually interesting legal question revolves around who (if anybody) is liable in this situation.
I'm not aware of any jurisdiction that doesn't have a law that covers unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, so I can practically guarantee it is illegal.
In Philadelphia I believe the relevant statue is https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/18/00.039.02... - although I'm actually unsure if towing would count as "operating" here? That's a question for their lawyer.
A crime where someone does something to somebody's property without intending to actually take the property, or not to take it permanently.
Not being familiar with this jurisdiction I can't say whether that's the actual law though. Depending on how it's defined it could easily be theft.
But what the plaintiffs are arguing is that it's failing due process at the constitutional level, which to perhaps oversimplify means the city isn't being responsible/fair with its law.
Nobody disputes it has the right to move vehicles for legitimate reasons (which these seem to be), but obviously it ought to be able to track where it moved them to and ensure it's not leading to fines and/or damage without recompense -- which it is clearly not doing. Their lawyers know the city isn't following due process, which is why the city is offering these payouts.
I grew up in NYC, and have a certain immunity to deal with aloof, hostile or otherwise obnoxious city officials. I’ve been to Philly on business and pleasure a few times and… forget it, it’s a whole other level. One wedding, literally 30% of the guest had a ticket, tow or other drama.
Life is too short. Philly makes Jersey look good.
This is all normal, every day, corruption.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...
And dropping the cars off in illegal spots, well the fine should go to the “driver” not the car.
I guess they are too lazy to change this or it is profiting someone personally?
They could do vastly better than the status quo with century-old multi-part paper form technology. "White Copy - Central PD Tow Office", "Yellow Copy - Precinct PD Tow Clerk", "Pink Copy - DMV, to mail to vehicle owner", ...
This kind of worse-than-brain-dead sh*t-show is why so many people emotionally identify with "the government is the problem", "de-fund the police", and similar slogans.
Those people are right. That is not just emotional, that is rational - that is the only sane attitude towards the fact that these groups with the power of violence over society are so incompetent or even malicious.
Another version of government could and should use its power to prevent these kinds of abuses rather than enable and benefit from them. But that form of government would look radically different from the one we have.
But why should they have to? It’s 2022, get a LoJack or AirTag for your private property that you leave lying around illegally in public space.
they were "courtesy towed" because the space became illegal after the car was already there
Based on the stories here, not not sure this is happening.
So you can screw with some people, maybe get a bribe to help them. It isn’t unreasonable to see why government employees are unhelpful - the system is dumb, wasteful, and nothing they do can fix it, and leaving the job means they will never have it as cushy again.
Can you point to any bribery for common, "retail" interactions with local governments? Outside the south? I'm actually curious, I didn't think most of the country was that far gone yet.
We called Enterprise who said the car had been properly returned by the previous customer days before, so it should be there. They paid for us to get an Uber to another available car, so we were only delayed and hour or so.
They did follow up with us and it turned out that the city had done a "courtesy tow" because the car was parked on a parade route the previous day. I'm not sure how they eventually found it, but they said that they couldn't activate the GPS tracking without delay and lots of approvals because of customer privacy issues.
I can see needing to move a vehicle in an emergency, but for special events and construction this shouldn't be needed in most cases. The city knows months in advance the date on which the streets need to be clear. They should plaster the neighborhood in warning notices a month before the event, then go through again the night before to check for stragglers who'd forgotten.
If people seriously end up thinking their car got stolen, there's a massive failure of communication. My thought should be "oops, I forgot about the event", not "where the hell is my car?!"
As a thought experiment, imagine that the city government was motivated to find a car's owner for some reason, perhaps as a suspect or witness of a serious crime etc. Meaning if they have your plate number and think you're a murderer, they will definitely find you and communicate with you (the message that they communicate will be "come to the police station").
I claim this is a proof by construction that they could communicate with you by some method other than posted signs, if they actually wanted to. And they just choose to do the laziest possible "post signs" solution because of basically incompetence/laziness, not because there's no other way for them to identify and communicate with a car's owner.
Also when they tow you it’s to a lot, they don’t just dump you on some other street like in Philly.
My email's on file with the DMV; I get emails when my plates are due for renewal. Local law enforcement likely has access to that database.
In theory if the city had its act together and had a way to let you know where your car had been put (and a process to ensure it's not placed somewhere you'll get ticketed), this is a much fairer option than carting cars off to an impound lot, which are privately run and generally notoriously bad in terms of hours / fees / ease of retrieving your car.
Philadelphia is also the first place I have lived where parking in the center median of major thoroughfares is normal:
https://www.google.com/search?q=philadelphia+center+median+p...
Speaking of, I live a block off South Broad Street (most of the images in the link) and not too long ago there was a marathon that required clearing of that street of all parked cars for its entire length. It _was_ well communicated, well in advance but you can imagine that if parking is tight when the street side parking _and_ the center median is chalk full of cars, relocating is difficult. I don't know if any cars were relocation towed, but I know the night before the event I still saw some cars parked on Broad.
I still think there are communications issues, the city should have a way for owners to find their car. But I also think it's a bit more complex than your first take. Communication is hard and at the scale of Philadelphia I am not too surprised that there are cases where things can go awry between all the various bureaucracies you have to interact with in something like this. I also think it's pretty reasonable that the lawsuit is looking to force improvements, not do away with the system.
Nobody puts signs up
Nobody gives notice
Nobody gives a good God dammed.
Park where you can, hope your car is there tomorrow, hope there isn't a gas leak, road collapse or towed randomly
Its so absurd we had a TV show called Parking Wars.
I was courtesy towed last week. I spend a year backing down a narrow (one car width) alley because we had a pothole the size of Alaska. I pushed an abandoned car onto broad street during rush hour to get it towed after 6 months. I had my car towed because of a local celebrity funeral. All my tires were slashed during the BLM riots. My friends car was flipped at the Phillies parade, anothwrs at the eagles rally. I've gotten hit with a baseball bat for asking someone to move their car.
Welcome to hell
Edit: did I mention our parking "authority" is extremely predatory, run as a nepotism program for local Republicans, siphons money from the city and has been routinely found to be absolutely kafkaesque. So bad they actually had their own petty court removed for being a essentially kangaroo court?
There's a whole history with parking here.
Yes, if our city was even one iota of a normal place we would expect these things. Instead we drop our pants and bend over because, well actually I don't know why we do, Stockholm syndrome?
I was parked in the middle of Broad and Snyder (in this section of South Philly it’s acceptable to park illegally in the middle of the street) because I couldn’t find another spot and had a flight to catch.
Came back a week later, car gone. Walked around for a couple hours then approached a cop parked nearby. After quite a bit of back and forth on the radio he told me my car was parked over 20 blocks away, curtesy tow.
Another time I parked on a Thursday, slept through a hangover on Saturday and missed the police posting for a street festival. That was some ordeal getting it back on Sunday. Took a couple hours and I think $250 or so.
I grew up in Seattle but lived in Philly for 2 years and this was one of the strangest things to me. In many cases they don't post _any notices at all._
I knew enough people who got "courtesy" towed with no records that I added a GPS tracker to our car to make sure I could find it.
See also: https://www.inquirer.com/news/courtesy-towing-south-philly-p... https://www.inquirer.com/news/towing-philadelphia-parking-au...
From a smaller data sample, parts of Oregon also do this as well.
Did they not do this?
Something similar happened to me where my car was towed to the yard (law says it should've been relocated iirc) for being parked in a construction zone while I was on vacation. When I got back I didn't check on my car for a few days and when I finally went to my car, I found it was towed and that I needed to pay $800 to get my car out. Thing is -- the permits for the construction on that day were canceled. So they did construction without a permit.
So when I attempted to contest it in court, I was pulled aside by the city's legal staff and told that they were throwing out the tickets, fines, and storage fees because they... didn't have enough information on the tickets. The judge signed the release and I had my car two hours later.
It's hard to give any ounce of good faith to these systems when they do things like not tell you they're throwing the tickets out before the court date, nor do they have any semblance of automation to find those sorts of ticket gaps. For me, I was able to take a couple days off of work to do research and go to court, but that's not the case for so many people.
I want to sue (towing fees became larger than what I put into the car) but I have no idea how to proceed? I don't have a family to depend on for this kind of advice. The market has been so insane since that I still haven't purchased a new car.
Open to any advice about how to not let these bastards win. My car was straight stolen from my parking spot, with everything inside.
Reminds me of when my motorcycle was towed from my apartment complex. It was held by a private towing company, but for some reason the city suspected the bike was stolen, so the tow lot (allegedly) couldn't release it until the city completed their 'investigation'. Meanwhile I was on the hook for every day that it sat in the tow yard (not to mention the rental car to get to work), but powerless to get it out. Eventually the city cleared it and I owed like 2k. I desperately wish I fought it but for some reason I just paid it...
Yes, we should also largely stop doing that (or at least frantically reduce how much land is dedicated to that purpose).
Parked cars are hindering transport for cars and bikes. My street has cars parked on both sides and at times there is only space for travel in one direction. So two thirds of the road width is dedicated to parking and it’s not facilitating transport.
> Problem is, the city doesn’t have a modern, reliable way to track the vehicles’ new locations, leaving owners wandering the streets for days or weeks, looking for their cars.
This would normally be the part where I (and probably half the other people reading HN) would say that building a modern, reliable way to track this is not hard. We'd go on to outline something involving a database, probably a mobile app for the tow truck drivers, and probably a web site for car owners. We'd probably say this is a small project that could be done by a handful of developers in a few weeks and would be fairly inexpensive.
Others would then tell us that we are vastly underestimating the difficulties of dealing with the mess that city IT tends to be, and that "fairly inexpensive" would still be expensive enough that there would have to be budget meetings and studies, and maybe the web site would need to support multiple languages, and a ton of other things we've overlooked.
So I'm not going to suggest that a modern, reliable way to track this would be easy.
But why does it have to be modern? What would be wrong with an old-fashioned approach?
Require the tow truck drivers to report the license plate numbers and drop off locations and drop off date/time to the police or perhaps some other government entity which can add the information to a list.
When an owner finds their car missing and contacts the police, the police can check the list and tell the owner where the car is and remove it from that list, and add it to a log of past courtesy tows along with a timestamp.
If the owner finds that their car got ticketed at the new location before they could reasonably retrieve it the log of past courtesy tows could be used to prove that the owner did not park at the new location.
This requires:
1. Tow truck drivers have a way to report the information. Voice or text from their cell phone to a phone number maintained by the police specifically for this would cover that.
2. The police need to maintain a list of these reports. This can be handled by having them copy the information to an index card and file the card alphabetically by license number in a card file.
3. Car owners or police called by car owners need a way to check the list. They can call the same number from #1, and the people that file incoming reports can also handle checking the card file.
4. The police needs to maintain the log. That's another, bigger, card file.
So basically we need a phone line, someone who will answer that phone, a file clerk with enough time to handle these, enough card files to hold the recent records, probably a shelf or two in an office to hold those card files, and a bigger card storage system for the historical log.
EDIT: or even a picture of their license plate would capture the GPS coordinates in the image file itself. It would be so incredibly simple to at least capture the data.
There were "No Parking xxxday for repaving" that were posted in the (somewhat desolate, few residences) area after I have parked. Even after explaining this situation to the operators, they still insisted that the city must have towed my car because I did not pay my parking tickets. Three/four operators, same line. They had no idea where they towed my car. It took my father and I over an hour, splitting the streets, walking the neighborhood and finding the car.
London has a centralised system where you can check if your vehicle has been removed to a pound/relocated:
https://trace.london/
The thing is that you have to pay the ticket, then fight it once (they automatically vote against you), then you appeal it, where they take a closer look at things, and then pass judgement in my favor. At times, I'm out hundreds of dollars and it takes 3-6 months for it to all resolve itself.
I'm tired of it.
If the local government can’t afford to tow cars to an impound lot and pay those fees, then they can’t afford to have local events. This is simply a case of having your cake and eating it too. Local government wants all the benefits of having events with none of the negatives (like actually planning and being responsible).
I actually don’t understand why there is no system where a note is issued by the tower that informs whoever that this car was moved as part of a courtesy tow and it is not subject to fines. I don’t mean a centralised system, I mean a sticker you can just bang on there. There should also be an option where you could call the DMV and they can “page” the owner to advise them were their car is located if someone is being inconvenienced by an unwanted car that has been towed.
There are so many simple options that won’t fix the issue but at least prevent it from being hellish. The fact that nothing has been done makes me feel like this is actually quite intentional on part of the parking authority for revenue reasons.