I am in favor of taking uninsured, and unlicensed illegal’s off of our roads. When you or I get a ticket we take care of it because we do not want it to go warrant, and the visit to the Sheriff’s Hotel is only in our nightmares.
I happen to like pancakes and will even stop at Denny’s for a stack of cakes for lunch. Consistantly I have noticed older vehicles without current registration parked where employees park. Even with the nake eye it is ease to spot indicators of vehicle code violations. I give people credit for working but they must comply with the laws.
Recently there was TV coverage of a retired citizen who house suffered major damage when a teenage DUI ran a stolen car into the retiree’s home causing thousands of dollars in damage. Like most citizens he does not have the thousands of dollars to make the home livable. But because the driver was not insured he needs to find the funds to repair the house.
Last summer during the critical part of the wildland fire season a Mexican employee of a company was smoking in cured grass. When other employees got on to him for it, his response was he did not care if he started a fire. If he started a fire he would be back in Mexico in a short time.
The article reflects on many issues brought forth in other discussion about DUI check points. Have fun this one.
“Seizing of cars makes for tidy profit
By Ryan Gabrielson
California Watch
Published: Sunday, Feb. 14, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1A
Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers.
Impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated an estimated $40 million in towing fees and police fines – revenue that cities divide with towing firms, an investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley, with California Watch has found.
Additionally, police officers received about $30 million in overtime pay for the crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety largely with federal dollars.
In dozens of interviews over the past three months, law enforcement officials and tow truck operators say that vehicles are predominantly taken from minority motorists – often illegal immigrants.
The Investigative Reporting Program reviewed hundreds of pages of city financial records and police reports, and analyzed data documenting the results from every checkpoint that received state funding during the past two years. Among the findings:
• Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Latino neighborhoods. Cities where Latinos represent a majority of the population are seizing cars at three times the rate of cities with small minority populations.
• The seizures appear to defy a 2005 federal appellate court ruling that determined police cannot impound cars solely because the driver is unlicensed. Police across the state have ratcheted up vehicle seizures. Last year, officers impounded more than 24,000 cars and trucks at checkpoints. That total is roughly seven times higher than the 3,200 drunken driving arrests at roadway operations.
• Departments frequently overstaff checkpoints with officers, all earning overtime. Nearly 50 local police and sheriff's departments averaged 20 or more officers per checkpoint – operations that averaged three DUI arrests a night.
Law enforcement officials say demographics play no role in determining where police establish checkpoints.
Indeed, the Investigative Reporting Program's analysis did not find evidence that police departments set up checkpoints to specifically target Latino neighborhoods. The operations typically take place on major thoroughfares near highways, and minority motorists are often caught in the checkpoints' net.
"All we're looking for is to screen for sobriety and if you have a licensed driver," said Capt. Ralph Newcomb of the Montebello Police Department in Los Angeles County. "Where you're from, what your status is, that never comes up."
The 2005 court ruling includes exceptions, allowing police to seize a vehicle driven by an unlicensed motorist when abandoning it might put the public at risk, such as when it is parked on a narrow shoulder or obstructs fire lanes.
But reporters attending checkpoints in Sacramento, Hayward and Los Angeles observed officers impounding cars that appeared to pose no danger.
Reporters also noted that many of the drivers who lost their cars at these checkpoints were illegal immigrants, based on interviews with the drivers and police. They rarely challenge vehicle seizures or have the cash to recover their cars, studies and interviews show.
Tow truck company officials relayed stories of immigrant mothers arriving at lots to remove baby car seats and children's toys before leaving the vehicle to the tow firm.
"I have to stand here for days and watch them take their whole life out of their vehicles," said Mattea Ezgar, an office manager at Terra Linda Towing in San Rafael.
This wasn't what lawmakers intended when they passed an impound law 15 years ago – the law since questioned in federal court, said David Roberti, former president pro tem of the state Senate.
"When something is that successful, then maybe it's too easy to obtain an impoundment, which should usually be way more toward the exception than the rule," Roberti said.
The impound law granted police the authority to seize unlicensed drivers' cars for 30 days. The California Department of Justice said in a statement that the state law is murky in terms of whether vehicles driven by unlicensed motorists can be taken at all.
With support from groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, California has more than doubled its use of sobriety checkpoints the past three years.
The federal government provides the state about $100 million each year to promote responsible driving that reduces roadway deaths. Of that, $30 million goes into programs that fund drunken driving crackdowns, particularly checkpoints.
DUI checkpoints have saved countless lives and brought thousands of drunken drivers to justice. And by inspecting driver's licenses, police catch motorists driving unlawfully, typically without insurance, and remove them from the road.
State officials have declared that 2010 will be the "year of the checkpoint." Police are scheduling 2,500 of the operations in California.
Police do not typically seize the cars of motorists arrested on suspicion of drunken driving, meaning the owners of those vehicles can retrieve them the next day, according to law enforcement officials.
To recover an impounded vehicle, owners have to pay between $1,000 and $4,000 in tow and storage charges and fines assessed by local governments, municipal finance records show.
Owners abandon their cars at tow lots roughly 70 percent of the time, said Perry Shusta, owner of Arrowhead Towing in Antioch and vice president of the California Tow Truck Association. Many unrecovered cars are sold by the tow firms, which keep the proceeds.
The city of Montebello's DUI checkpoints rank among California's least effective at getting drunks off the road, the Investigative Reporting Program found.
Last year, officers there failed to conduct a single field sobriety test at three of the city's five roadway operations, state records show.
Montebello brought in upward of $95,000 during the last fiscal year from checkpoints, including grant money for police overtime. The California Office of Traffic Safety continues to fund Montebello's operations, providing a $37,000 grant for this year.
The state does not consistently collect data on where local police departments set up their 1,700 annual checkpoints. A majority of California law enforcement agencies declined to release records showing which intersections they target, or what transpired at checkpoints.
But cities across the state operate checkpoints in high minority communities, the Investigative Reporting Program found through demographic data and more than three dozen interviews with law enforcement officials.
Officers do not inquire about the drivers' residency status. Nor do they contact U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they suspect unlicensed motorists are in the country illegally.
But checkpoints in cities where Latinos are the largest share of the population seized 34 cars per operation, a rate three times higher than cities with the smallest Latino populations, the reporting program's analysis shows.
For 12 years, Francisco Ruiz has run El Potro, a Latin music nightclub, at the northeast corner of A Street and Hesperian Boulevard in Hayward. He had never seen a DUI checkpoint until 2009, when the city's Police Department conducted four operations just outside his front door.
"They're not taking drunk drivers," Ruiz said as he watched cars crawl through a Dec. 18 checkpoint at the intersection. "They're taking people without a license."
An hour into the operation that evening, officers had yet to make a DUI arrest, reporters observed. But about a half-dozen cars were impounded, leaving drivers stranded. Only one of the drivers could show he was a legal U.S. resident.
The disparity between vehicles impounds and DUI arrests exists in virtually every region of California.
In San Rafael, 10 of the city's 12 sobriety checkpoints the past two years took place on streets surrounding the city's heavily Latino neighborhoods. Those operations resulted in four DUI arrests and 121 impounded cars for driver's license violations.
California police have seized the cars of unlicensed drivers for 15 years under the state law that allows such impounding for 30 days.
But in 2005, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in an Oregon case that law enforcement can't impound a vehicle if the only offense is unlicensed driving. To do so would violate the Fourth Amendment, which protects everyone within the United States, whether they are legal residents or not.
One exception is called the "community caretaker" doctrine, which permits police to impound a car if it poses a threat to public safety.
In response, California's Office of Legislative Counsel in 2007 called into question the legality of the state's impound procedures. A lawsuit challenging the impound law's constitutionality is awaiting oral arguments before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The state and several cities argue that impounds are penalties for a criminal offense, and therefore car owners are not subject to Fourth Amendment protection. “
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