Lovely Rita

There's an uproar in Oakland over parking tickets. The city has been aggressively enforcing parking violations, some for the first time in decades, all in the hope of replenishing the city's coffers. No one likes to admit it, but parking tickets are a regressive tax that disproportionately hits the poor. Tickets are also a valuable revenue source for urban politicos. The same Al Sharpton types who think drug busts are a sign of White Oppression don't think twice about draonian parking laws that make commerce and car ownership unnecessarily difficult. But the sometimes random nature of enforcement leaves some room for mischief:

Oakland parking officers were ordered to avoid enforcing neighborhood parking violations in two of the city's wealthier neighborhoods but told to continue enforcing the same violations in the rest of the city, according to a city memo obtained by The Chronicle
.
The July order is corroborated by interviews with three parking officers, who said they and their colleagues had complained about what they deemed a discriminatory practice since it began last summer - to no avail.

"It's not fair," said Shirnell Smith, 44, a parking officer for 22 years who has lived in Oakland for 24 years. Smith and the union representing parking officers said the policy has resulted in tickets being issued disproportionately to poor, black and Latino people.

...

the parking department had deemed certain tony neighborhoods - Montclair and Broadway Terrace - off-limits from those two parking infractions. Parking violators in those neighborhoods were to receive "courtesy notices," according to a July 24 memo by Ronald Abernathy, a senior parking enforcement supervisor, sent to four parking supervisors and copied to parking Director Noel Pinto. The letter did not explain why the two neighborhoods were being spared from the tickets, which carry fines ranging from $40 to $100.

Reached on his personal cell phone Wednesday, Abernathy would only say, "I don't answer any media questions."

That's almost too good to be true. How many of us have griped about selective enforcement for different neighborhoods? It turns out that, at least in Oakland, it's true. Not only that there is an official city policy to favor wealthy neighborhoods over poorer ones, even though Oakland, is much more noisy than San Francisco in its egalitarian "progressive" attitudes.

Of course, the people complaining about this might want to consider what sort of unfairness is going on here. Maybe people in Broadway Terrace are paying less for parking violations, but they generally pay a lot more in property taxes than the rest of Oakland, and those taxes are paying for a lot of dysfunctional, not to mention, expensive government. In its own dim way, Oakland is trying to placate some of its more important revenue sources who could very easily move to Berkeley or Alameda if the city of Oakland made life in the Special City even more of a hassle than it already is. It's not like they are sending their kids to Oakland's crappy public schools or anything.

And, of course, it would never occur to anyone that you wouldn't need to use parking tickets as a revenue source (rather than a method of punishment) if the size of Oakland's government had so outstripped its tax base.