71–80 of 142 posts
I hate free street parking but this is so bizarre and unfair that I actually feel sympathy for the parkers.
It is amazing how much public land is taken over for the parking of private vehicles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn’t check the license and registration of the vehicle?
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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Temporarily depriving somebody of their property counts, these towings are clearly theft. The actually interesting legal question revolves around who (if anybody) is liable in this situation.
> 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…
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…
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.
> 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 adv…
Did they not do this?
> 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 adv…
That’s what happens in my area. Signs go up a week or so in advance saying you’ll be towed if parked there past date X.
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.
> 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.
> 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 adv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If the driver is otherwise complying and saying “this is my vehicle, wtf are you doing?” then: no, I strongly disagree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is amazing how much public land is taken over for the parking of 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.
Yes, we should also largely stop doing that (or at least frantically reduce how much land is dedicated to that purpose).