Features

The Oakland Police Department official in charge of Oakland’s sideshow enforcement activities may have seriously understated the number of vehicles towed in Oakland in connection with a state sideshow car towing law. 

State Senator Don Perata is seeking to reinstate a four-year-old law that allows police to tow cars and impound them for 30 days, solely on the police officer’s word that the cars were involved in sideshow activities. The sideshow provisions of the so-called “U’Kendra Johnson Memorial Act” expired in January of this year after Oakland officials failed to provide documentation for its renewal. 

SB67, the new legislation that seeks to reinstate the old SB1489, has passed the California State Senate on an urgency basis and is currently being considered in the Assembly Transportation Committee. 

Last March, OPD Captain David Kozicki, who oversaw Oakland’s sideshow crackdown for most of its years, told members of Senate Public Safety Committee during a hearing on that the renewal of the law was necessary as a deterrent. 

“The law hasn’t been used that much in Oakland,” Kozicki said. “Maybe 25 times since it was passed.” 

But documents recently provided to the Berkeley Daily Planet by the Oakland Police Department show that between August 2004 and December 2005 alone, OPD lists at least 22 cars towed and impounded for 30 days by Oakland police under the “reckless driving” offense that triggered the sideshow tow provisions. 

The records were in response to an April 3 request to OPD Chief Wayne Tucker for “Any and all public records in [Tucker’s] possession and/or control which refer to vehicles impounded by Oakland Police Department Officers under the authority of SB1489, the “U’Kendra Johnson Memorial Act, between Sep. 1, 2002 and the present date.”  

OPD officials have provided crime reports and stored/towed vehicle reports on 105 separate towing incidents between August 2004 and the end of 2006, when SB1489 sunsetted.  

Kozicki did not provide any documentation to State Senators last March of his car confiscation estimate. In addition, OPD officials have said the overdue response to the Public Records request—due within 10 days, by state statute—was caused by the department having to compile all of the records. In producing the records, OPD Acting Police Records Manager Deborah Fallehy said that up until now, OPD has not produced a report on cars towed under the SB1489 sideshow car tow ordinance. 

Because no towing reports were provided between September 2002, when SB1489 went into effect, and July 2004, during a period when OPD conducted a widely-reported “crackdown” on Oakland sideshow activity, the number of 30-day confiscations could be considerably higher than Kozicki reported to State Senators. In addition, because the Daily Planet only included in its number of 30-day confiscations only those reports which specifically stated such confiscations, the actual number of 30-day confiscations in the reports may actually be higher as well. 

In addition to the reports of the vehicles towed under SB1489, the Daily Planet asked for the amount of time each vehicle had been impounded under the statute. The Oakland Police Department is still compiling that information, and has estimated completion by the end of this week.