THE 72-HOUR FRAUD
I recently took a trip in my motor home to San Jose, and about half an hour after I returned, I saw a DPT worker “red-tagging” my vehicle. When I asked him why he was doing that, he replied, “This vehicle has been here for more than 72 hours.”
A few months ago I parked my motor home on Folsom Street in a one hour parking zone. About five minutes later a meter-reader came up to me and, smirking, asked “Do you know the penalty for erasing those marks we put on your tires?” I asked him what he was talking about, and he said he knew for a fact that I had been there for four hours.
Back in the 1980s there were two school buses parked on Frederick Street in the Haight for months. They finally got red-tagged, and then I arrived with my two school buses. The first buses left, and soon afterward a cop arrived with a tow truck and began towing my buses. I asked why she was doing this, and she said that they had been red-tagged. I told her she was wrong about that, that it had been two other buses that had been red-tagged, not mine. She insisted that she had red-tagged my buses, adding “We get a lot of complaints about these buses, they’ve been parked here for months.” These are a but a couple of examples of two prejudices common to cops and DPT’s meter readers: if a bus, motor home, or other large or funky vehicle appears on the street, it’s automatically been there for more than 72 hours; and if they see such a vehicle somewhere and later see a similar one, they are one in the same vehicle.
This type of thinking is more associated with reptiles than human beings. Yet these “reptiles” are officially authorized to make your life miserable, which makes them a far greater nuisance than rattlesnakes.
What is this red-tagging all about, anyway? Why do owners of large, old, unusual, or potentially lived-in vehicles constantly get these things?
In case you are like most people and have never gotten or even seen a red tag, it is an 8- 1/2” x 11” piece of red paper which states that you have been parked more than 72 hours, this being in violation of Section 37A of the San Francisco Traffic Code. If you don’t move your vehicle, according to the notice, it will be towed after another 72 hours have elapsed. Parking for more than 72 hours, according to this law, means you have “abandoned” your vehicle; that is, you don’t wish to own it anymore.
Some vehicles are genuinely abandoned. The owner leaves his vehicle on the street, often after removing major parts such as the engine or wheels, and / or removing the license plates. Such cars will never move on their own; they will sit until their tires go flat and their windshields become opaque. No-one is perturbed when these cars get towed, no-one will redeem them at City Tow.
But the majority of vehicles that are redtagged do not fit into the above category. These are the ones for which red-tagging constitutes an abuse — an instrument of harassment and nothing more. The red tags state the vehicle is “in violation of the law” for being parked more than 72 hours, but it is simply not true. I have gotten red-tagged many, many times only minutes after shutting my engine off. Someone decides they don’t want you parked there, calls the cops, and the cops come and red tag. The 72-hour period is beside the point.
If you own a bus, motor home or trailer, red tags follow you wherever you go. In these cases, what that piece of paper really says is “We don’t want you here. You don’t have the right to park here.” Such vehicles, it seems, are “in violation of the law” simply because they exist.
But if you are like most people and own a conventional automobile of recent manufacture, none of this 72-hour nonsense applies to you.
You don’t need to pay attention to how long you’ve parked your vehicle unless you are in a time-restricted zone. If you have street cleaning on your block, you can move your car for that reason. Otherwise, if you don’t need your car you can leave it parked. You may be at home sick, or out of town for a long weekend, or maybe there’s just no place you wish to go. You would probably be shocked to learn that, under these circumstances, according to the law you have “abandoned” your vehicle.
Ridiculous? Absolutely! But nothing is likely to happen to your clean, late-model car because such a vehicle does not get noticed. It is the big ones, the old ones, and the unusual ones — the ones that stand out — that are always at risk of being red-tagged regardless of how long they’re parked. And worse, they are at risk of being arbitrarily towed, with SFPD or DPT later claiming that the vehicle in question had been redtagged in accordance with the law.
If you talk to the owners of “questionable” vehicles, you will find that this “invisible red tag” routine is common in San Francisco. It’s our word against theirs, and we never win.
The 72 hour law is idiotic and completely unenforceable because no-one has a cop or meter maid following them around to note the time that they parked. I have never heard of anyone who documents the date and time they park, and then rushes out to move their car after 72 hours have elapsed. Nobody, including the cops and the meter maids, does this.
That 72-hour period is meaningful ONLY after your vehicle has been red-tagged. Prior to that, it is impossible for anyone but the owner to know for sure if the vehicle has been moved, unless someone literally watches it every minute for three days. This, of course, is self-evident, and it’s obvious that no cop or meter reader is going to do it.
It becomes an issue, however, for those of us who own vehicles of which society doesn’t approve. It is an issue because many cops and DPT workers will tow based solely on their observation of the vehicle. They feel that placing the warning notice on the windshield is an option, not a requirement. If they applied the same methods to all vehicles, half the cars in the City would get towed.
Like the yellow star Jews were forced to wear to facilitate their destruction, the red tag has become the identifying mark for vehicle the City wants destroyed. And it will destroy them sooner of later if the parts thieves, who are instantly attracted to red-tagged vehicles, don’t do it first. Once such a vehicle is towed it is effectively lost, because even if the owner pays the huge ransom demanded by City Tow, he usually gets it back damaged and with no certainty that it won’t simply get towed again. For most people, there is no choice at all: they lose it.
As in Hitler’s Germany, the government sends unintelligent, prejudiced people onto the streets to enforce their superstitions and erroneous perceptions. The victims are not the vehicles but the people who own them. Vehicles cannot suffer; people can. Getting towed is a trauma and a nightmare — something that should happen in extreme situations, such as when a vehicle is blocking traffic.
To tow a car for the trivial reason that it has been parked for three days (something almost every car has done) is just another example of how our society inflicts unnecessary suffering as a matter of course.
The towing is done because it has become an industry, because it makes money for the City and for City Tow, and because the cops and DPT workers have fun doing it. The latter is so because many cops and DPT workers are basically “playground bullies” who never grew up, full of adolescent rage and wanting to clobber somebody. Towing someone’s car is one way of venting these primal urges.
It is not hard to see that what we have hear is an evil and, as Gandhi constantly asserted, to fight against evil is a solemn duty. Doing nothing only assures that the evil will not only continue, but grow.
Anonymous