Date: August 17th, 2018 12:51 PM
Author: Translucent wonderful bawdyhouse partner
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This common misuse of disabled parking permits could cost you $1,000
By BENJAMIN ORESKES
APR 13, 2017 | 4:10 PM
(Video by Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
Dressed in heavy boots and plain clothes, the Department of Motor Vehicles investigators lay in wait, ready to strike.
They skulked behind concrete slabs in the parking lot of the Glendale Galleria shopping center. Their quarry: customers suspected of illegally parking in spots reserved for the disabled.
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"Hello, ma'am. I'm a DMV officer of the peace. We're doing a compliance check," one investigator said as he flashed his badge at a woman who parked her white Mercedes in one of the spots.
She was asked to produce her license, the placard and her registration.
But the placard didn't belong to her.
The woman insisted it belonged to her husband.
But since it wasn't hers, she was cited — and you could say she was apoplectic.
The TV camera crews that descended on the scene only made her more livid.
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With tears welling in her eyes, she tried to walk away from the officers as she exclaimed: "Am I being arrested?"
Soon her husband and daughter arrived. They hurled expletives at the DMV investigators and then at the scrum of media.
An undercover officer with the DMV waits with a shopping cart next to a disabled parking spot while conducting an enforcement sweep of fraudulent and improper use of disabled parking placards at the Glendale Galleria.
An undercover officer with the DMV waits with a shopping cart next to a disabled parking spot while conducting an enforcement sweep of fraudulent and improper use of disabled parking placards at the Glendale Galleria. (Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
"You portray our president as bad," the daughter said as she tried to shield her face with a handbag before declaring the whole lot, well, jerks (but with another word).
The DMV — which has 200 sworn peace officers across the state — dispatched investigators to the shopping center Tuesday to nab people improperly using the disabled parking spots. These most desirable spots are close to the store entrances.
In the last three years, the state agency has conducted 270 of these enforcement operations and handed out about 2,000 citations. The number of citations issued has increased each year, according to data provided by the DMV.
DMV Commander Randy Vera said that it's not uncommon for people who are caught to say that the disabled placard belongs to a spouse. But the person to whom the placard has been issued must be in the car when it's parked in one of these spots. Vera said the problem is worse in areas where there aren't many parking spaces and a lot of demand.
Last year lawmakers, believing there was rampant abuse, tried and failed to pass legislation toughening up regulation of the disability placards.
"The most frequent violators we get are those who are utilizing parking placards of a friend or a family member or a placard they found," Vera said.
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Sometimes people will buy them online, he added.
The citations can lead to fines that range from $250 to $1,000. On this day, the investigators stopped 280 people and found that 42 of them were using their placards fraudulently. They issued misdemeanor citations to these offenders.
The DMV recently conducted similar operations in Sacramento, and several years ago the department launched Operation Blue Zone.
ljl 42 out of 280 is insanely high
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4054077&forum_id=2#36633060)