I Fought A Parking Ticket & Won: On Tickets & Taxation
This fall I purchased my first car. It was a gorgeous, rugged, perfectly Californian little truck, and sadly, a piece of shit. After a handful of late-summer drives up the PCH to and from Malibu, it was revealed to be wrought with mechanical issues and constantly pegged with parking tickets. To add insult to the perennial injury of being sold a lemon, one weekend, my car was towed from its spot on a residential street, after temporary no parking signs were erected overnight. In order to release it from the impound lot, I had to pay some $300 in fees, and to get those fees back, would be forced to represent myself before a hearing officer, against the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) to make my case that there were no probable grounds for my towing.
After about a week of discovery preceding my trial, I gathered a body of evidence to prove that both the towing and the parking ticket were illegitimate exercises of power by the construction company, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), and LADOT. The City’s public records database, Zimas, which houses all development and construction permits, disclosed that the construction company which ordered the towing of my car had not purchased their work-order permit until the day before they were supposed to begin work and they put up no parking signs on cones less than 12-hours before…
