SF Tickets Stolen Car 29 Times!

Back in September Michelle Vuckovich's Honda Civic was stolen out of her South San Francisco apartment garage . Tough break, but that's the way it goes some times, right? Ms. Vuckovich reported the car as stolen immediately and the make and plate number were entered into a statewide system. A couple weeks later, Ms. Vuckovich received a citation in the mail indicating the car had been ticketed by a San Francisco parking control officer just hours after she had reported it stolen. Okay, that's understandable. The car probably hadn't made it onto the watch lists yet. Another ticket arrives in the mail, this one issued the day after the car was reported stolen, and after it had gone out on the watch-for list. Things are now a little more frustrating. Shouldn't the parking control officer have known the Civic stolen? Then another ticket and then six more tickets in less than a week!

Since the parking tickets seemed to have been coming from the same area, Ms. Vuckovich and a friend decided to try to find the car themselves. As luck would have it, they found the car just as they were about to give up and immediately notified the SFPD. When the officer showed up, he wasn't very interested in finding the car thief but did manage to lose Ms. VUckovich's driver's license.

To add my own experience, my father's car was also stolen and received numerous parking tickets in San Francisco. It wasn't an easy process getting those tickets waived, either!

What's Parking and Traffic's response? The hand-held ticket devices that parking control officers use only store auto theft information from San Francisco's database, not the entire state. Given the parking ticket prices that SF charges, shouldn't it be able to upgrade to either networked devices or ones that can store all the state's info?

source: sfgate