The crew in the dirty white van crept slowly up to the maroon Honda Civic parked on Lucile Avenue in Silver Lake. The car's tires were small -- the perfect size for a small "Rhino" boot.
A few minutes later, the van pulled alongside a gray Nissan Maxima on Van Ness Avenue in the Wilshire Center neighborhood. For this job, the large Rhino boot was the right fit.
The van was driven by members of Los Angeles' Habitual Parking Violators Unit, a crew of street-hardened traffic enforcement officers who clamp down on parking scofflaws by incapacitating their vehicles with large wheel locks known as boots.
The small and large Rhino locks are just two of a handful of heavy, metal boots the city uses as a not-so-subtle reminder to motorists to pay their tickets.
The officers are also armed with the Helix and Palma boots. The brightly colored locks -- named for the boot manufacturers -- come in various sizes and designs. It's not a one-boot-fits-all situation.
The use of this assortment of boots is an example of how the Habitual Parking Violators Unit -- now in its 15th year in Los Angeles -- has honed its tactics to more effectively bring problem parkers to justice.
A few years ago, the unit also replaced slower, bulky computers in the patrol vans with new high-speed laptop computers that allow crews to check the number of parking tickets on a dozen cars at a time.
The efforts have paid off. The unit of 14 vans, each operated by two officers, install up to 90 boots a day -- more than twice as many as when the program was launched in 1987. Once a car is booted, the owner has 72 hours to pay the outstanding tickets before the city tows it away.
The fear of being booted has apparently persuaded many Angelenos to be more diligent about paying overdue tickets. When the unit was created, about 65,000 vehicles had five or more outstanding parking tickets, making them eligible for the boot. Today, fewer than 30,000 vehicles are eligible for the boot.
The booting vans are deployed out of a poorly lighted parking structure in Hollywood known to traffic officers as "the bat cave." Like the caped crusader Batman, half of the crews work under cover of darkness, cruising the city's 6,400 miles of streets from 2 to 7 a.m.
While one officer drives, the other quickly punches license plate numbers into the laptop. When the computer responds with the message "BOOT ELIGIBLE," the officers jump out, grab a boot -- each weighs about 35 pounds -- and get to work.
