Olympic Park Neighborhood Council Opens Discussion on Fighting Vehicle Confiscation
By Luis Rivas
Last night at the Olympic Park Neighborhood Council (OPNC) meeting, held at the LAPD West Traffic Bureau building, the resolution to end vehicle confiscation at sobriety checkpoints for other than the reason of legal intoxication was hotly discussed and debated.
Present at the neighborhood council meeting were members of the Southern California Immigration Coalition, along with a former teacher from Oakland , a reporter from the Neighborhood News and the South Central Neighborhood Council, the first neighborhood council in Los Angeles County that passed the resolution.
The OPNC discussed matters of expenses and budgets, a replenishing of T-Shirts, approving the purchase of an HD Flip camera, computers, business cards and a $2,500 DVD projector (with inflatable viewing screen).
But it’s safe to say that the issue that garnered most attention was that of Joseph Hancock’s proposed resolution of officially calling for an end to the vehicle confiscation of unlicensed drivers at sobriety checkpoints. The resolution was brought to the OPNC by Hancock after witnessing the South Central Neighborhood Council unanimously passing the identical resolution this past December 21, 2010.
This resolution was passed in Oakland and has been seen with popularity as a fair and safe city ordinance that eases the financial hardship on already struggling low-income members of the community. One aspect of the resolution allows a driver to leave his or her vehicle parked with the intention to pick it up at a later time or have a licensed friend or relative come to recover the vehicle. Avoiding the high cost of impoundment fees is the instant outcome. But more fundamentally, and this was precisely the area of controversy and heated discussion for the OPNC and some of its stakeholders, is why are people driving without licenses? Who are they?
In short, a majority of these drivers are undocumented immigrants. The issue of citizenship or residency status disables undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver licenses. Needless to say, given the affordable opportunity to obtain a drivers license, most if not all will take advantage of going through the legal channels. But the necessity of using a vehicle to commute to and from work (as well as day-to-day parenting duties, i.e. picking kids up from school, shopping, etc.) often times outweighs the potential and costly risks.
Yes, the argument can be made that driving is a privilege, but only after examining the real life economic context of a low-wage employee in the county of Los Angeles will reveal that this state-offered privilege is actually only one by name and name alone; it’s an unavoidable integral part of daily living, especially for working parents.
The city of Bell is probably one of the most infamous documented cases where police officers and sheriffs were caught accepting payoffs from tow-truck companies for their close work with officers for such a high amount of confiscated vehicles, according to South Central Neighborhood Council member Ron Gochez. Or how about this: another documented incident is that of these same police officers and sheriffs training their fellow colleagues to look for old, beat-up vehicles with religious imagery on the bumper or dangling from the rearview mirror, essentially a form of racial profiling, according to National Lawyers Guild member Cynthia Anderson-Baker.
Maywood, Santa Clarita, San Francisco, Oakland and other cities and counties see the unwarranted and unfair targeting on immigrant, low-income and people of color communities and have taken the necessary steps of implementing an end to vehicle confiscations for reasons (which include not having a license and/or insurance) other than operating a vehicle while legally intoxicated.
The Olympic Park Neighborhood Council voted four yes on passing the resolution and five opposed with two abstentions. The resolution brought up good debate and discussion. There was a feeling amongst the guests and stakeholders that certain neighborhood council members were perhaps introspective on the lack of enforcement on the meeting’s overall rules of order and the leniency given to speakers during discussion on finance and other matters, these same matters that can be safely stated as having less priority and having less correlation with these same stakeholders and less affluent members of the expansive Olympic Park Neighborhood demographic.
Joseph Hancock will be bringing the resolution back to the OPNC in March’s meeting, having taken fellow neighborhood council members suggestion of re-wording the resolution. And a crowd is surely to follow.
