In Los Angeles, No License, No Problem
Though it seems to have gone unremarked upon – until now – on last week’s Ricochet podcast our own Mollie Hemingway let it be known she had once been an unwilling overnight guest in “the D.C. clinker.” Rob Long expressed the hope that the charge was Drunk and Disorderly, while I preferred to imagine her as having given some Kennedy or other a nice bop on the beezer after he miscalculated her receptiveness to the old Kennedy charm. Alas, she reported she was pinched for the more prosaic offense of driving with a suspended license.
Which got me to wondering about the member of the D.C. gendarmerie who had seen fit to slap the cuffs on a young mother of two and haul her before the bar of justice. In my own police career in Los Angeles, I’ve tried to make what we in the trade call “quality arrests,” i.e. those that serve to remove the most troublesome and dangerous criminals from the community. Not to excuse Mollie for driving with a suspended license, but on a list America’s 400 largest cities, Washington, D.C. comes in at number 22 when it comes to serious crime (PDF). This raises the question of whether some police officer’s time might have been better spent by admonishing Mollie to square away her relationship with the DMV and then going off in search of someone who presented a greater threat to the commonweal than she did.
And this brings me, awkwardly, to the topic of my most recent column at PJ Media, indeed of a few of my recent columns: What to do about people who drive without being properly licensed? California law authorizes – even encourages – police officers to impound for 30 days any car driven by someone whose driver’s license has been suspended or revoked, or who has never been issued a driver’s license. The Los Angeles Police Commission, the civilian body that oversees the LAPD, voted recently to all but eliminate such impounds on the grounds that they are unfair to those L.A. residents who are precluded from obtaining a driver’s license, i.e. illegal immigrants. LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has called it an issue of “fairness” for people who need their cars to get to work in the sprawling L.A. area.
So now we have here in Los Angeles a local policy being used to subvert a state law for the purpose of allowing people who should not be here to keep the cars they should not drive so they can get to the jobs they should not have.
Readers, your thoughts?
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Jul '10
Re: In Los Angeles, No License, No Problem
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.
2) Why in the world does DC arrest people with suspended licenses? In most states you get a summons to appear in court and tell them if you've straightened it out.
Don't know about other states, but in South Carolina, people get arrested for DUS all the time. Generally it's for second or greater offenses, or if the suspension is for failure to pay traffic tickets (the logic being, if they don't pay their tickets, why give them another one?)
We're supposed to tow the car too, although there is no set period of impoundment. Often officers will get around this, if the driver can get a licensed driver to come to the scene and drive for them, but this practice is not viewed kindly by Police Department management, and it's not hard to understand why. Just let someone with a suspended DL wreck and kill someone, with a courtesy summons in their glove box.
Up will go the cry that you could have taken this dangerous driver off the road but didn't, and the sound of salivating attorneys will echo 'cross the plain.
Feb '11
Re: In Los Angeles, No License, No Problem
Aloha Johnny got to the point/question I was going to ask: It seems likely that those with suspended licenses and unregistered vehicles, etc. are far less likely to have insurance. That, it seems to me, is the big problem. Impound the car if it is unaccompanied by insurance no matter immigration status.
Aug '10
Re: In Los Angeles, No License, No Problem
I'm against any deprivation of property without due process. I put these impound policies in the same category as forfeiture laws, which take your property with no 30-day time limit for having been used in the commission of an alleged crime for which you haven't been convicted.
If they want to impound something, let them impound the illegal alien. Let his friends or family members come and pick up the car at their convenience.
May '10
Re: In Los Angeles, No License, No Problem
G K Chesterton is often credited with observing: "When a man ceases to believe in God, he doesn't believe in nothing. He believes in anything." The legal corollary to this might be, "When a society ceases to enforce its laws, it doesn't get more considerate. It becomes lawless."
Upon what basis will you now cite hit-and-runs? bank robbers? murderers? If the principle is that a state law need not be enforced, why should not that principle apply to any state law?
Re: In Los Angeles, No License, No Problem
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.
My license should not have been suspended. The DMV accidentally flagged my license (which in itself is another horrific story about bureaucracy). Even finding out what happened wasted days of my time.
Mollie,
I assumed a bureaucratic snafu was involved, and I can well imagine the frustration in getting it sorted out. I think I can speak for the Ricochet community in expressing my relief to learn that you're not a scofflaw, and that the moral character of the Ricochet staff remains unsullied. (Except of course for that of Hollywood hobnobber and RINO squish Rob Long -- 13 indeed.)
I suspect the typical DMV experience in D.C. is no more pleasant than it is here in Los Angeles, where, during last year’s Wisconsin public-union imbroglio, workers at my local DMV office showed their solidarity with their brothers and sisters in Wisconsin by wearing bright red (!) T-shirts emblazoned with the the logo of their labor union, the SEIU. Explains a lot.
Edited on March 16, 2012 at 10:25pm