Call Kurtis

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ― Two years after Call Kurtis exposed Los Angeles for writing parking tickets to people who have never even been to the city, he's learned they're still at it.

No one likes getting a ticket, but it's even worse when it wasn't you.

Frank Densmore is a country guy who volunteers as a park host at the Stillman Mcgee Park in Clements.

"I got this notice from the City of L.A. that i owed them a parking ticket on my pop up tent trailer and it was silver in color," Densmore told Call Kurtis.

It's his license plate, but his trailer is green and white, not silver. The cob webs prove it hasn't moved in years. Densmore has never been to Los Angeles and he says he doesn't have any way to move that trailer.

"If I wasn't in Los Angeles, how could I have gotten the ticket," Sheilah Cunningham of Brentwood told Kurtis.

The flight attendant got a parking ticket in Inglewood from the L.A. Sheriff's Department on May 6th.

"I knew I wasn't in Los Angeles," she told Kurtis. "I knew where I was on the sixth. I was in Maui. My car was in employee secured parking."

She spent three days gathering bridge Fastrak records and parking logs showing when she parked at the San Francisco Airport. She says it proves she's not guilty.

Getting random tickets from the L.A. region is an issue we first told you about two years ago.

Art Blakeman and his wife from Sacramento each got a ticket from L.A.

Mark Lawrence, a sheriff's detective from Ione got more than 30 tickets from the City of West Hollywood.

Kurtis traveled to Los Angeles where he learned there are actually 88 different agencies that write tickets in the Los Angeles Region.

The City of L.A. alone has an army of more than 300 pencil pushers who write 12,000 parking tickets a day.

Kurtis questioned Robert Andalon with the City of Los Angeles, "Should the City of Los Angeles be writing upwards of 12,000 parking tickets a day if it can't do so without making mistakes?"

"We only write the tickets that are necessary because the violation occurs," Andalon responded.

Andalon says the number of citation slip-ups has dropped slightly since our last story, but according to his figures city officers still write on average about 48 bogus tickets every day.

If everyone paid them, that adds up to more than $600,000 in extra revenue each year.

Officers are trained to enter the license plate, make, model and the vehicle identification number into their handheld computers.

If all that information doesn't later match up with the DMV database the tickets are supposed to be investigated or dismissed.

Sometimes officers out on the street don't get all the information.

"All officers are trained to take VIN (vehicle identification numbers), if available," Andalon told Kurtis. "But if it's covered, a lot of dashboards are covered with newspapers and paper, you're not able to get a VIN."

His office claims that happens in one out of 25 tickets. When Kurtis asked if it's possible officers are being lazy and don't want to write down the VIN, Andalon responded, "I think all things are possible, but I wouldn't go ahead and say that."

There was no VIN written on Frank Densmore's ticket.

"They're trying to blackmail me out of $35 dollars or $70 dollars. That's what it is: blackmail," Densmore told Call Kurtis.

When we showed Andalon Densmore's ticket with no VIN, and the wrong color on his trailer it was dismissed right away.

"We should've caught this," Densmore said.

And once Sheila sent in her packet of evidence, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department dropped her ticket admitting to us they mixed up a 4 and 5 and didn't cross reference her vehicle's information.

L.A. County Sheriff's Department Spokesperson Steve Whitmore told Kurtis, "we're sorry about that, we don't like to make mistakes."

Andalon says he can't predict the future and whether Northern Californians would stop getting tickets, but he did say the City of L.A. is training staff to catch these bogus tickets sooner.

"I think we'll minimize the error rate, but i would never say we'll get to zero. Anything that involves humans, will involve possible errors" Andalon said.

That never feels good, if it affects you.

"Stinks, it's not a great system", Cunningham told Kurtis.

The City of L.A. says it could be as simple as doing a better job listening when people call up to contest a ticket. If someone says the make or model is wrong, the VIN is wrong or they claim they weren't even in the city, it should get to a manager and dismissed faster.

Whatever you do, don't ignore a parking ticket. The fine could keep going up and keep you from registering your car.

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