Stuck in Park : L.A.’s ‘Boot Squad’ Clamps Down on Car Owners With Unpaid Tickets

Cruising the streets of Los Angeles in their hefty Econoline vans, they strike at dawn, while the city sleeps.

They are the men and women of the city’s Habitual Parking Violators Division: the Denver boot commandos. As a part of the Department of Transportation’s 530-person Parking Enforcement branch, 27 traffic officers work in the Habitual Parking Violators Division. The six two-person teams are responsible for auto apprehension.

Armed with mobile digital terminals--computers hooked to the department’s parking ticket database--and 30 to 40 boots, the squads fan out across the city looking for “boot-eligible vehicles”: Cars with five or more unpaid parking tickets.

Introduced to Los Angeles in 1982, the Denver boot has become the scourge of parking scofflaws who wake to find their cars immobilized by the bright yellow metal claws.

No car is sacred. The squads boot Cadillacs, Lincolns too; Mercurys and Subarus. And if your candy maroon Impala with the gold rims and tinted windows has a $1,000-plus bounty on it, the officers will impound it on the spot.

Although errant owners with five or more tickets have 72 hours to pay up and spring their booted cars before they are towed, vehicles with more than $1,000 in fines are impounded by the Habitual Parking Violators Division.

Needless to say, the traffic officers don’t win many friends.

“We find the response is the same everywhere we go,” said Don Howard, the division’s senior traffic supervisor. “(Car owners) are not happy to see us.”

Brenda Lifsey, a legal secretary who had her car booted and towed last year in Westwood, certainly wasn’t.

“It’s not as if I think I didn’t deserve the tickets,” Lifsey said during a visit to the Rampart district’s Parking Violation Bureau to contest yet another parking ticket. But having to pay the towing and storage fees for the four days her car was impounded, along with the fines, came as a shock.

“$400 plus $35 for the boot fee,” complained Lifsey. “ ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I didn’t ask you to boot my car.’ It was a real education.”

The booting teams crisscross Los Angeles, taking three to four days to cover one of 18 parking enforcement “sections,” whose boundaries are patterned after Los Angeles Police Department divisions.

Booting shifts start at 5 a.m. and end at 1 p.m. The work is time-consuming; a unit may take up to five hours to patrol a five-square-block area.

High-density neighborhoods such as the Wilshire district or Hollywood can produce 20 to 30 cars a day for the units, said Officer Larry Tigue, a 20-year veteran of parking enforcement. But some of the city’s outlying neighborhoods do not yield their bounty so easily.

“Sometimes you get up to the Valley and you only get one or two all day and you get . . . “ Tigue paused and groped for the right word: “ . . . bored.”

Casually cornering a car on a recent morning, they write down its identification number, record interior items and lock the boot in place. The process takes less than two minutes.

“I wrote parking tickets for 16 years,” Tigue said as he booted a Mazda 626 at the intersection of 4th Street and Normandie Avenue. “And that gets old after a while.”

Officer Michael Castagnola drives at a snail’s pace along the 3800 block of Potomac Avenue as Officer Stanley Peek methodically types the license number of every car they pass into the terminals.

The mobile terminals can scan only 12 license numbers at a time. The computer hunts down offenders with more than five tickets and displays the violations--along with the amount owed to the city--in yellow letters on a 3-inch by 6-inch screen. The typical offender who gets booted owes $300 to $400.

“We sometimes have cars with two different plates,” Peek said as he booted a bronze AMC Coronet. “One in the front, a different one in the back. They try all kinds of games.”

Each team boots an average of 10 vehicles a day, said Agusto Ortilla, the division’s management analyst. The overall number of vehicles booted averages 1,400 a month.

At first, Los Angeles booted only those vehicles with out-of-state license plates or lapsed registration. But in 1984, the City Council adopted a comprehensive traffic law enforcement plan that called for hiring more officers, writing more tickets, increasing the number of illegally parked vehicles towed and increasing the use of the boot. The plan also transferred traffic and parking law enforcement from the LAPD to the city’s Department of Transportation.

Booting a black Merkur XR4TiI on the 100 block of Occidental Boulevard, Tigue and his partner, Officer Pam Dortch-Lee, prepared the car for towing. It took Tigue less than a minute to anchor boot to car, which had accumulated $1,054 in fines.

“Generally, we don’t see the owners,” Tigue said. “We just boot ‘em and we’re gone. But some people with a lot of tickets, they watch their cars.”

And sometimes, they come out screaming.

About half the owners who confront the officers are angry, said Dortch-Lee. But few are violent.

When confronted by an owner, irate or otherwise, the officers hand out a slip of paper with the Parking Violation Bureau’s telephone numbers and payment locations. If things get ugly, they call in the police.

At 11 a.m, the division’s release units hit the streets, liberating those cars whose owners have paid up. Those who don’t pay up in time pay the price.

Towing charges are $69.50, and the garages charge $13 a day in storage fees. Impounded vehicles are towed to garages that have been approved by the Police Commission.

If a car is abandoned by the owner--in some cases the fines are double the vehicle’s Blue Book value--the garages can begin a lien sale on the vehicle, with the approval of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Only about 10% of the cars booted and towed by the city are abandoned by their owners, said management analyst Ortilla. But a growing number of habitual parking violators are able to keep one step ahead of the law.

Dortch-Lee marveled at the ingenuity of boot outlaws as she wrote up the Merkur.

“You get some (boots) that are (removed) intact,” she said, shaking her head. “They’re in the same position like they’re still on the car, but they’re still intact. I don’t know how they do it.”