So, my truck was stolen. It’s been missing for several weeks. It was recovered today by the Arcadia police department, who had it towed some twenty miles away to the lot of a private tow company. I received a message from the Arcadia PD to this effect, with the number to the tow truck company.
I called the tow truck company. To release the vehicle, I apparently need to bring in a vehicle release form from the PD.
Also, my registration has lapsed. I’ve been not operating it, but apparently I needed to give the DMV money for the right to have it parked and not being operated. Fun. And I didn’t do that. The registration expired in January.
But apparently my registration was canceled last June. This was because I didn’t have it insured. This seemed reasonable because, you know, I wasn’t driving it.
Also, for a long and horrible reason that deserves a longer explanation in a later post, I don’t have the title for the vehicle.
That’s not the only thing I need to release the vehicle, though. I owe the tow company $175. For towing my stolen vehicle to a lot absurdly distant. I don’t need the truck any longer. I asked them if it would be OK to just sign it over to them. They said they needed the original pink slip. I asked if it would be OK to give them DMV form 227, which is expressly designed to allow transfer of ownership with a stolen title. No, that’s not OK. I need the original. I would get this, by mail, through the DMV.
This would be fine, except that they will charge me $50 per day to keep my truck on their lot. Now, they automatically own the car after 42 days, at which point they’d hold a lien sale. But I’d still owe them for the accumulated storage costs ($2100), minus the amount of money they’d get for the truck at auction (roughly $13.17, largely due to damage done by the thieves, resulting in the ignition being destroyed in some fashion and the driver’s side door not being closable.)
So, on genius advice, I called the local NPR station to see if they would come pick it up. They can do that, as early as tomorrow. And they will accept the transfer-of-ownership-without-title form. So I can get the release form from the Arcadia PD, pay the tow company $225 ($175 in tow fees plus $50 in storage fees), for the right to donate my car to charity.
So I called Arcadia back, to see what the procedure is to get a release form.
“Well, normally you would come down here and get one,” I was told. “But your registration has lapsed. Normally we’d release it anyway, because you’re the victim. But it’s been ten months [since, unbeknown to me, the DMV canceled my registration]. So it’s up to the watch commander.”
“So, basically, what you’re saying is that whether or not I get a form allowing me to reclaim my vehicle that was stolen from me is up to the discretion of whoever is sitting behind the desk at that moment?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s basically what I’m saying,” I was told.
“That’s funny. I thought we had a system of laws to determine issues such as these,” I responded.
“Well, we do,” she said. “But a big part of it is institutional policy.”
What? Institutional policy? That’s … surely not what she means. Surely she means something like “officer discretion”. I later had a debate with my father about this (short, because I ended it) about whether on not police discretion was reasonable. I contended that it was not. My father contended that it was just fine. I recounted a story I had heard about a police officer who explains that she won’t give tickets for driving under the influence. It would be hypocritical, she argued, because she drives drunk. Isn’t officer discretion … what gets us into a place in which minorities are disproportionately targeted versus white people? Basically, it seems, whether or not I get my release tomorrow is a function of how much the cop likes my story and how I look. Christ.
So, I’ll keep my readers posted. We’ll see if I can get police permission to pay hundreds of dollars to a private company contracted by a California city for absconding with and storing a vehicle stolen from me to allow me the right to donate the vehicle to charity.
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