Chalking cars is a
police practice that I can personally attest to as being at least 30+
years old. I remember getting warned about it in my youth when I
visited Richmond, Kentucky. And, I must admit to coming out every so
often, in different towns in different States, to find one of my my
car’s tire marked. I never got tagged with a ticket from the marked
tires which I guess means I was always one of the lucky ones who got
back to my car in time.
For those of you who
don’t know what I’m talking about, chalking is a long hallowed
practice of many a police departments’ traffic enforcement
division. Broad Street has a two hour limit on parking. Traffic
officers travel down the street every so often and mark the tires of
cars parked on the street with chalk. Then they come back two hours
later and if your car is still parked there with chalk on its tire
you get a ticket.
It’s actually the
better of the two traditional options for controlling parking. The
other is control thru annoyance by using parking meters. Nobody likes
meters. If there’s a meter, the person parking downtown has to
bring quarters with her and run out to her car every hour or so to
put another one in. Conversely, the in-town businessmen who want to
limit parking duration so that the spaces will open every so often
for their next customer don’t want someone not stopping at their
store because they don’t have a quarter for the meter. Of course,
the fact that the meter puts a big red “EXPIRED” after the time
has run out makes life easier for traffic enforcement and the same
amount of enforcement probably ends up with more tickets.
But, it looks like
meters may be the default solution from here on out – at least in
the Sixth Federal Circuit. In Taylor v. Saginaw,
a scofflaw got tired of paying her tickets. She sued Saginaw for
violating her civil rights by marking her car’s tires with chalk
and then using that mark to charge her with parking violations. For
some reason, this burning issue made it to the federal court of
appeals and they agreed with her.
Personally,
I think the 6th
Circuit got the constitutional analysis right. Chalking the tire of a
car is a trespass upon the chattels of
the car owner and it’s done to reveal information that otherwise
would be unknown. Therefore, police ought not to be doing it without
a search warrant (or at
the very least probable cause).
Saginaw’s arguments in favor of allowing officers to do it were
that chalking was allowed under the automobile exception and/or
community caretaker exception. They
lost the automobile argument because it’s based on the fact that
cars are mobile and the entire point of chalking a car is to prove it
wasn’t mobile. As well, there really isn’t any immediate harm to
the community which chalking is designed to protect against.
Strangely, the one argument I think might have had some teeth,
relying on the administrative search exception, was abandoned by
Saginaw in the court of appeals; I can only imagine that case law
must not have been favorable.
Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan can no longer use chalking.
Huzzah! Hooray!
Or
maybe not. All a locality
has to do is avoid touching the car and it can continue its ongoing
battle with those who hog
parking spaces.
The
old fashioned solution to this is to put meters up everywhere. As
pointed out above, meters suck and don’t make anyone happy except
the bean counters downtown who now have a new revenue stream. As
best I can find on the internet (which must mean it’s true) a
reasonable cost for a
single space meter is less than $500 assuming the locality buys the
sane version instead of the crazed upsell monstrosities.
The investment is probably made up within two years and then,
assuming your city
is the typical poorly designed failure
without adequate parking, becomes a wonderful profit stream. It
punishes your citizens and almost surely hurts your businesses (after
all, there’s free parking at the shopping center outside town), but
it provides a profit stream for the government.
However, assuming
you have people in your city government who care about their citizens
and only want to make parking work, there are other solutions in the
modern world. In particular, license plate scanners should make this
process even easier for officers. Instead of getting out of their
vehicles to chalk a car or using a long stick with a piece of chalk
on its end to do the same thing while remaining seated, the traffic
control officer simply drives down the street every thirty minutes
with the scanner getting the plate of every car. Software in the
police car pings every time a car has been there for over the allowed
time. Heck, if the system is even halfway sophisticated it can do
what the toll systems do nowadays and simply report all the
miscreants to some central computer so that tickets can be mailed to
them later. The officer doesn’t even have to stop. Personally, I
think they should; a ticket on the window has a more immediate
deterrent effect than a ticket in the mail a month later. Even then,
the computer could print the ticket out automatically so the officer
only has to spend a few seconds stepping out and putting it on the
car. It’s a better system; it just costs a lot more money than
chalk.
If the locality
doesn’t want to spend the money to put a license plate scanning
system in its parking enforcement vehicles, it could simply buy each
officer a cheap cell phone and have them take pics of the street with
the time and date turned on so they’re burned into the picture and
then come back later to check to see if the same cars are there after
the time limit has run. Simple. Effective. Cheap.
So, this weird
little opinion shouldn’t change things all that much. You’ll
still get parking tickets. You just won’t be subject to the grave
injustice of having a chalk mark on your tire.
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