Page 11 - IAV Digital Magazine #553

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Chalking Tires Illegal, Judge Says, But City Gets Big Break
By Ed White
DETROIT (AP) — A Michigan city violated the U.S. Constitution by chalking tires to enforce parking limits, but it won’t be forced to
refund thousands of tickets in the class-action case, a judge said.
Saginaw must only pay vehicle owners “nominal damages” of $1.00 for each
marking, U.S. District Judge Thomas Ludington said Monday.
“The basic prob- lem is that chalk- ing is relatively harmless,” he
said, noting there was no damage to cars.
Saginaw staff marked tires and subsequently wrote tickets if they returned to find a vehicle was parked too long.
After five years of litigation, includ- ing two appeals to a higher court, Ludington ruled in favor of Alison Taylor, who received 14 tick- ets. The judge said marking tires without a warrant violated constitu- tional protections against unreason- able searches.
“No reasonable person would argue that some- thing as trivial and transitory as chalk on a tire offends a reasonable expectation of pri-
vacy. But the Fourth Amendment pro- tects more than those expecta- tions that society deems reason- able,” Ludington said.
Saginaw, among other arguments, had cited a 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of police who were investi- gating a murder and scraped paint from a vehicle without a search warrant. Ludington said that case didn’t fit.
“The governmen- tal interest in solv- ing a murder is considerably greater than the governmental interest in enforc- ing a parking ordi- nance,” he said.
Tire chalking was used in approxi- mately 4,800 Saginaw parking tickets, which cost $15 or $30, depending on whether they were paid on time, Taylor’s attorney, Phil Ellison, said in a court filing.
Saginaw stopped chalking tires in 2019.
“We cleaned clock. We did very well. Nobody had ever done this before,” Ellison said Tuesday.
But he said he was still trying to understand why the judge ordered only $1 per chalk- ing as a remedy. An appeal by either side is pos- sible.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine