
Court Says Using Chalk on Tires for Parking Enforcement Violates Constitution - codezero
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/23/716248823/court-says-using-chalk-on-tires-for-parking-enforcement-violates-constitution
======
thefifthsetpin
I suppose I'm happy that the fourth amendment was upheld, but from a privacy
perspective I'm disheartened.

A chalked tire was ephemeral. I doubt that whatever replaces it will be.

~~~
kd5bjo
Given this ruling, the 2012 ruling about GPS trackers, and the ubiquity of
number plate scanners, it’s possible someone could challenge the
constitutionality of requiring license plates on vehicles — they’re not all
black model Ts anymore, so there’s less need for the registration number to be
visible a mile away.

~~~
seattle_spring
Oh good, even less chance to catch hit and runs. Removing license plates would
mean a field day for criminals all to appease a few tinfoil hat wearers.

~~~
acct1771
Tinfoil amplifies signals.

That, and "conspiracy theorist", are propaganda terms, and should be rejected.

~~~
seattle_spring
Yeah, no. /r/conspiracy has a 1000 comment thread that witchhunts people at my
friend's company _because it shared an address in SF with some dating site
loosely related to Hillary Clinton._ People I cared about were literally
threatened with their lives.

~~~
acct1771
Everybody that reads about conspiracies, or discusses conspiracy theory, must
be just like those people.

...wow.

------
intrasight
I had a very pleasant experience with "Parking Enforcement" in a commercial
district outside of Pittsburgh recently. I had either forgot to put money in
the meter or it ran out. Got back to my car to find a ticket. The fine was
only a dollar and I think it was voluntary. On the ticket was printed a note
explaining that the business community really values people coming to visit
and so doesn't want to annoy those people with high parking rates or ticket
fines. It was the most pleasant parking ticket experience I could imagine.

~~~
blotter_paper
What bizarre machinations of Moloch; "we decided to fine you, but then we
decided to not fine you, so we had to settle on fining you as little as
possible while still fining you because we have to fine you or there wouldn't
be a reason for this sub-sub-department of us to exist."

~~~
foxyv
I think the "fine" was the cost of feeding the meter. To be paid if the person
wants or not.

~~~
blotter_paper
That could be the rationale, but I doubt it. Seems more likely they were
trying to keep their target numbers up (they're not allowed to call them
"quotas" anymore). An officer with low numbers gets passed up for promotion. A
department with low numbers gets passed up for budget increases. Gotta keep
writing tickets, or there isn't a reason to exist anymore...

~~~
intrasight
I think it's more likely that the business community told the traffic police
to piss off. This was a financially distressed community whose main street
business district is trying to bounce back.

------
ocdtrekkie
I would much rather they chalk my tires than store my car's license plate and
location in a database...

~~~
lugg
I find it strange we the people for the people by the people don't just
straight up outlaw things like this with an amendment.

The constitution is a great document that lasted far longer than expected. And
surprisingly holds up extremely well to modern era technological change.

But I suspect the founding fathers would be down right horrified by the loss
of privacy and liberty that has taken place in the name of safety.

Why do they need chalk or a location database? Find a better solution that
doesn't require loss of privacy. It's not hard even with tech from 50 years
ago.

We are supposedly at the pinnacle of civilization and knowledge. Yet we are
not yet wise or skilled enough to question and alter that which governs us?

I mean a lot has changed since then our understanding of the reasoning may
have been loss but I suspect non breaking improvements may be a viable course
of action.

~~~
larkeith
The sad answer is that the great majority of voters are ignorant and/or
apathetic about privacy - at least in comparison to things like taxes and
health care. The population that is willing to vote against party lines for
privacy is trivial, whereas the government (at every scale) is heavily
incentivized to invade privacy.

Before we can change the government, we need to make people _care_ \- and
while recent debacles (see: Facebook) have helped, there's a long way to go
yet.

~~~
andrewla
The not sad answer is that the great majority of voters understand that there
has to be a tradeoff between the ability of the police to detect and enforce
the law and our personal privacy.

Generally, transparency, rather than privacy, could be reasonably said to be
the driving function of government -- things like arrest records, court
records, marriage records, real estate transactions, are all public records,
with exceptions being made only for cases where the harm of the record itself
exceeds the public benefit. To facilitate credit markets we've even gone so
far as to make personal credit information semi-public.

If you want something to be private, it's your responsibility to keep it
private. And all privacy goes away in the face of a lawful search and seizure,
accompanied by probable cause. The (very wiggly) privacy line is only crossed
when another party goes to unreasonable lengths to violate situations where
you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

------
javagram
The logical solution would be for cities to switch to photographs and even
automated cameras, which in the end will probably be more invasive of privacy
than a chalk mark on your tires.

Funny how the legal system can work sometimes.

~~~
bunderbunder
The more logical solution, from the city's perspective, might be to just get
rid of free-but-time-limited parking. Then parking meters could serve as both
the enforcement mechanism and another revenue source.

~~~
chongli
If they tried to do that then they'd have a massive protest by traffic
enforcement people. They don't want that.

If you look at almost any seemingly wasteful/pointless/inefficient thing a
local government does, you're pretty much guaranteed to find jobs behind it.
The very slight relief of annoyance from what these things cause to the
general public is not enough to overcome the extreme outrage that occurs when
a group of people lose their jobs.

~~~
nine_k
Why. Park, register with a meter. Your first 15 minutes are free, as they used
to be. More time is paid time. Unregistered parking leads to an immediate
ticket.

Those who did not abuse the system continue to park for free, and may expect
more vacant spaces.

------
cromulent
A lot of places in Europe just use a parking disk. No chalking, no second
check needed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_parking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_parking)

~~~
stendinator
I have seen officers making notes of how the tires are aligned so they know
whether the car has been moved when they come by a second time. (Seen in DACH
countries)

~~~
_archon_
What's to say you didn't leave and return and your wheels are in roughly the
same configuration?

------
michelpp
20 years ago Portland, Oregon used to chalk tires and had coin fed meters in
downtown. And a fleet of go-cart driving officers for the rest of the city.

Around that time the city started moving to electronic meters in downtown that
produced a printed ticket with a time that you were required to post on a
street facing window. There was the usual city waste and political kickbacks
iirc, at least one city employee got caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

Now the traffic enforcement officers have a handheld plate scanner, on each
end of every block the parking enforcement signs have a QR-like code on the
back that the officers first scan, then they go down the block scanning every
car, then they scan the sign at the other end. This defines a complete audit
trail of the officers movement with respect to every block and every car.

Using this technique, they not only scan for expired tickets, but can also
issue citations for expired plates, previously unpaid tickets, warrants for
outstanding criminals (in which they notify city police) and even summon a
boot or tow truck.

I suspect that all cities that use chalk now will eventually move to some
fully automated system like this. Perhaps not even ticket printing machines,
just cameras looking down at all the cars, watching them (and you) come and
go. Stay too long, and you get a ticket in the mail. Have a warrent on you an
the police are there waiting when you return. The upshot for them? Besides the
usual hands in cookie jars like in Portland, they won't have to pay all those
traffic enforcement officers.

~~~
brownbat
Reminds me of tolls.

It makes me comically angry that our toll roads require RFID equipment in most
cars and slow cash lanes for people without. The fallback for people running
the toll booth is to automatically take a photo of the plate and send the
owner a bill.

Why not just use the fallback system as the primary system?

You already have the equipment to collect tolls automatically. Why do I need
to glue something to my window or wait in a long line to pay cash?

Comically angry because I know this is "old man yells at cloud" territory.

~~~
brianpgordon
The Golden Gate Bridge did away with cash lanes a long time ago. There are
signs that tell you to go to their website, where you can enter your license
plate number and pay with a credit card.

------
hallman76
Couldn't take the time to park legally then went out of her way to launch a
lawsuit against the city. This is not community behavior. It's toxic.

~~~
umanwizard
Yeah, this does seem like someone getting away with antisocial behavior.

The thing about the US legal system (and other systems derived from English
law) though, is that legal rulings aren’t only about the particular case —
they establish general principles that will be applied in a variety of future
cases.

So, if they’re doing their jobs properly, judges should not be thinking of how
sympathetic a particular party in a particular case is.

One famous example of this is Ernesto Miranda, by all accounts a horrible
monster (murderer and rapist). The Supreme Court rightly ignored the
distasteful nature of the particular individual, and threw out his confession
as having been illegally obtained. That’s why we have what are now called
Miranda rights, something practically every liberal can agree is a good thing.

(Tangent: in case you were wondering, Ernesto Miranda was still convicted, in
the end. The evidence against him was strong enough even without the
illegally-obtained confession.)

~~~
rsync
"Yeah, this does seem like someone getting away with antisocial behavior."

I think I would agree with you, if she lost ...

However, the ruling suggests that her behavior was _not_ antisocial _by
definition_.

I have never thought to care about this issue, nor would I spend my time
fighting it, but if the constitution is ruled to disallow this behavior her
lawsuit was, again, by definition, a socially positive act ...

~~~
magissima
She was still parking illegally, the court just threw out the method they used
to catch her.

------
jrs235
Instead of chalking the tire they can chalk the pavement just before and after
the tires. Perhaps they could even write the license plate number on the
pavement too.

~~~
citizenkeen
The appeal of chalking the tires is you can do it pretty fast, and if the car
moves, so does the chalk.

Chalking the ground doesn't work - "I just got here. That was chalk from
before."

Chalking the license plate doesn't work, it takes way too much time to write
out all the license plates .

~~~
penagwin
My understanding is that the chalking is mostly an aid for the parking people
to keep tabs. "I just got here" can be used for any situation involving a
ticket can't it? It's your word against the parking person anyway.

> and if the car moves, so does the chalk. But the person handing out tickets
> would notice they moved. Or, if a person is trying that hard to evade
> tickets while still parking were they aren't supposed to, wouldn't they just
> wipe off the chalk?

~~~
function_seven
The chalk on the tread of the tire proves you didn't just get there, though.
If you did, then it would not have been possible for the parking enforcement
officer to have chalked it an hour ago.

But if it's on the pavement, it's not crazy to imagine the marks were for a
previous car, and that you parked in the same spot. Even the officer would be
unsure of it.

~~~
jameshart
Chalk your own tires, it's the only way to be sure.

------
Pxtl
Didn't the whole "drinking and driving" thing establish that the 14th
amendment is limited when it comes to the complicated relationship between a
private vehicle on publicly-owned roads?

I can see the argument that a GPS tracking device crosses the line because the
intent is to track the _owner_ of the vehicle and the scope is far beyond
their interaction with the public roadway.

But on this? It's directly about your usage of the public roadway for storage
purposes.

~~~
epylar
This case seems to be more about the 4th amendment.

~~~
dragonwriter
It's about the rights in the Fourth as incorporated against the states by the
Fourteenth, just like DUI stop cases, but the safety factors at issue in the
DUI (and other traffic) stop cases that have been held to make limited stops
reasonable without cause short of probable cause do not seem to apply to the
case here.

------
codezero
This is really interesting.

The summary is that chalking a car is similar to attaching a GPS device
without a warrant, and it violates fourth amendment rights.

I imagine an easy workaround for this is to just take photos of the license
plates with geolocation and have an app that can easily show you who was there
~ 1 hour ago. Probably less efficient initially, but I'm sure they could
automate it.

~~~
jcadam
Oh good, so now cities will need to pay a contractor to develop, operate, and
maintain some complex hardware/software solution to perform a task that was
until now being easily and efficiently performed using a stick of chalk.
Because... reasons.

Hmm... I'll have to keep an eye out for the RFPs.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
It already exists. It's just too expensive for small municipalities.

------
tareqak
What about people who stick flyers under windshield wipers? Isn't that also a
physical trespass? What about dropping flyers into open car windows, or into
convertible cars with the hood down?

Will cities start having "chalk notices" similar to cookie notices that
websites have saying that you consent to having your car wheels chalked by
using this parking space?

~~~
kelnos
People who stick flyers under windshield wipers aren't government entities, so
they aren't bound by constitutional notions of what is and isn't a reasonable
search.

Having said that, I _really_ wish this practice was considered a form of
property damage or defacement, maybe littering, or at least, as you suggest, a
form of trespass.

------
ryanwhitney
Would this extend to companies putting flyers under your windshield wipers?

(Years ago—also in Michigan—I turned on my wipers and ended up with a
littering citation. Probably still legit, but please don’t put trash on my
car.)

~~~
floren
IANAL but while I don't think the 4th Amendment would apply, you might be able
to make an argument that they are trespassing? Personally, I'd like to nail
the guys who put landscaping flyers in sandwich bags with some rocks and drop
them on my driveway.

~~~
cr0sh
> Personally, I'd like to nail the guys who put landscaping flyers in sandwich
> bags with some rocks and drop them on my driveway.

In the grand scheme of things, this kind of advertising for me is minimal at
best. I'd by far much rather that the junk mail I get sent via postal mail
would go away, though the practical effect of that would be that the postal
system itself would die, I suppose.

That said, had I started collecting the rocks from those baggies the day I
bought the house, I'd probably have a pretty nice rock landscaping by now.

------
edoo
I used to work in a government office when I was young. One of my jobs was
every 165 minutes to go out and wipe the chalk marks off the tires of anyone
in the department who parked on that wonderfully close to work street.

------
pmcollins
I used to listen to a radio show hosted by a law professor and iirc he said
that airport security doesn't violate the privacy amendment because you don't
have to fly. When you choose to fly you implicitly wave those rights. How is
this different?

~~~
tantalor
Basically, yes:

 _9th Circuit Court rules on U.S. vs Davis, 482 F.2d 893, 908... airport
screenings are considered to be administrative searches because they are
conducted as part of a general regulatory scheme, where the essential
administrative purpose is to prevent the carrying of weapons or explosives
aboard aircraft ... are allowed if no more intrusive or intensive than
necessary, in light of current technology, to detect weapons or explosives,
confined in good faith to that purpose, and passengers may avoid the search by
electing not to fly_

[https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/20/how-
the-t...](https://flyingwithfish.boardingarea.com/2010/11/20/how-the-tsa-
legally-circumvents-the-fourth-amendment/comment-page-1)

------
sfink
My immediate alternative would be to drop a grape behind a tire.

Though the fact that it's edible is problematic. The rats (with and without
wings) would enjoy my scheme.

Still, any cheap inedible alternative would work. As long as, when you squish
it, it stays squished.

But that leads me to think: why not build it into the parking spaces? Glue
something down that takes just over 2 hours to fully reinflate. Would need to
be wide enough to ensure it gets run over. Probably want to be clever and make
the reinflation not appear to be linear - once it gets to a certain point, it
would stand itself up or something. Would be fun to design.

------
PaulHoule
... now there was that time somebody noticed that the Sheriff always had a
vehicle parked at the airport and was curious if it ever moved and proved that
it didn't by chalking the tires.

------
rmason
I'm left wondering if the ruling applies to cops using it on people who
frequent bars? It's common practice at least in rural areas in Michigan to
target cars in bar parking lots.

If you're there for three hours they assume you will be leaving drunk so they
put a chalk mark across your headlight. They park down the road and stop
everyone with the mark on their headlight.

It's not foolproof because people catch on and wipe down their headlights
before leaving the bar ;<).

~~~
jMyles
> It's not foolproof because people catch on and wipe down their headlights
> before leaving the bar.

There are many reasons it's not foolproof, chiefly among them that leaving a
bar is not a basis for knowing that someone is over the legal limit for
operating a motor vehicle. The driver might well be a DD.

------
zelon88
Honestly paying for parking is an insult in the first place.

Here in MA to drive a car you have to pay.....

1\. Sales tax, whether you bought the car out-of-state or not. This is
calculated by the RMV and NOT by your bill of sale. So if MA thinks your $500
car is worth $3,000 you're paying 6.25% of $3k.

2\. Registration fees that go up every year. This pays for the 4 hours you
have to sit at the RMV watching people who get paid $30/hour help one person
every 15 minutes.

3\. Private insurance, which is required. Lots of out-of-state policies aren't
eligible, so we see ads on TV for competetive policies from Progressive,
Geiko, ect yet nobody in MA is eligible to buy them. It's worth it to note
that state vehicles don't need insurance as they are "self-insured." So if you
crash into a cop you or your insurance will pay 100% but if a cop crashes into
you the town and its taxpayers get to pay 100%.

4\. We have toll booths all over the fucking place yet we still have some of
the worst paved road conditions in the country. Anyone who has visited
Cambridge MA can attest to this.

5\. We pay yearly excise tax on each vehicle to the town we live in.

6\. Exorbiant state fuel tax (27th highest in the nation).

How much more can they charge us for infrastructure without actually having to
invest anything on infrastructure? On top of property and income tax and sales
tax and excise tax you've gotta pay $3 to park on a public street.....

~~~
typicalbender
My understanding is that pay for parking (aside from large garages) is
generally about space availability rather than making money. Public street
parking in Boston is fairly cheap per unit time and my understanding is that
the maximum time limits are meant to allow new people to come in and take the
spot to do whatever business they need to do in the area. Otherwise people
would just squat on spots all day and the businesses would be starved for
customers.

Not disagreeing with all the other shenanigans you listed for Ma though.

~~~
zelon88
I agree with your assessment, but not entirely. If it weren't at all about
making money you could just stand up a kiosk that dispenses parking tickets
and not charge money for them. The ticket-to-park method of parking
enforcement doesn't _require_ the payment element to enforce parking laws.

------
rubyn00bie
<rant> So can I retroactively sue the Berkeley municipality? I'm not joking
(...okay I am). I've gotten a fucking ticket literally every time I've been in
Berkley because they don't keep track of WHO marks your tires or WHERE they
fucking mark them. The city also refuses to at all harbor the mere concept of
a mistake by their own... </end-rant>

And yes I know I ain't ever getting my money back from the city of Berkeley.

------
kmm
Is there a reason disc parking is not practiced in the US? Seems a lot less
work than marking tires or keeping track of license plates. Are there any
legal or other issues with it?

~~~
Jach
Probably some combination of never hearing of such a thing (I just looked it
up) and that the whole idea of directly paying for parking / time-limited
parking is still offensive to many of us ("just build more parking lots") and
doesn't exist in many places. Then after hearing about it an obvious objection
is that it puts an extra burden on the driver to manage the thing even when
they just want to pop-in/pop-out, and that if the level of abuse is actually a
problem we might as well go all the way with a full blown pay-always approach.

------
titzer
They can't chalk your tires but they can get a location trace from your mobile
phone just because you were close to the wrong place at the wrong time. Pfft.

------
not2b
Even if this ruling is upheld, parking enforcement will just switch to using
photos or license plate readers. At least in an area that uses chalking for
enforcement, if your car hasn't been marked, you'll over the time limit but
you can't leave immediately, you know you have a little more time. No such
luck when you don't know whether your car's license plate # has already been
recorded.

------
jrochkind1
On the other hand, imprisoning people for fleeing danger and seeking refuge
without the rights we even give other people arrested before trial who are
actually accused of a crime, stealing their babies and putting them in cages
or giving them away to Christians, all that is totally fine under the 4th
ammendment and the rest of the Constitution.

Thank God we live in a free country!

------
negativez
There are two obvious possible solutions to this from the city:

(1) tiny print on the parking signs that says you consent to be chalked,
creating an explicit contract

(2) sell the rights to manage the city's parking to a private entity using
private contractors to chalk with no prescription on methodology, rendering
the "search" non-governmental in nature

------
bluedino
Here's a link to the local news story about this topic:
[https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-
city/2019/04/appeals-...](https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-
city/2019/04/appeals-court-rules-chalking-tires-violates-fourth-
amendment.html:wq)

~~~
paradoja
Fixed link: [https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-
city/2019/04/appeals-...](https://www.mlive.com/news/saginaw-bay-
city/2019/04/appeals-court-rules-chalking-tires-violates-fourth-
amendment.html)

There was a :wq at the end (too much vim everywhere ;) ).

------
OliverJones
My hometown uses license plate recognition. To pay for parking we put our
license plates into the kiosk. The enforcement person has a gadget with camera
instead of expired meters.

------
atomical
Dupe:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19724969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19724969)

------
sytelus
Legally speaking, city could have easily argued that parking space is not a
_private property_ and therefore they can easily enforce an agreement to be
chalked. I wouldn't like this but the thing is that 4AM cannot be applied if
you willingly relocated your private property in to a place that is not owned
by you. This is the principle (I think) behind government able to search in
whatever way they deem fit at airport because airport is not your private
property. If supreme court upholds this then things would become very messy
for the government.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Legally speaking, city could have easily argued that parking space is not a
> private property and therefore they can easily enforce an agreement to be
> chalked.

They could perhaps enforce such an agreement, if the agreement existed.

> I wouldn't like this but the thing is that 4AM cannot be applied if you
> willingly relocated your private property in to a place that is not owned by
> you.

No, the fourth Amendment doesn't go away on public property, generally.

> This is the principle (I think) behind government able to search in whatever
> way they deem fit at airport because airport is not your private property.

It's not. A variety of administrative search criteria together with the “grave
and urgent” need to prevent hijackings is, and it's not unlimited.

[https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/482/482.F2d...](https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/482/482.F2d.893.71-2993.html)

------
cheriot
Seems like there's a simple solution to be found here. Don't put the chalk
mark on the car, put it on the city owned street underneath it.

------
thomasjudge
If tire chalking constitutes an unconstitutional seizure, I wonder when we
will see followup suits over towing and booting

~~~
sfink
No, because that only happens when there's reasonable belief that you are
breaking a law.

------
chungleong
I suspect that this decision will get overturned. People don't have privacy
expectations concerning the appearance of tires of their cars. Any member of
the general public can come by and chalk your car. No specialized equipment is
required. As I recall, that was the deciding factor when the SCOTUS ruled that
finding pot-growers with the help of a an infrared camera was
unconstitutional.

~~~
AcerbicZero
I don't believe the argument being used here is about expectations of privacy
- its in regards to the trespassing of a police officer by interacting
directly with your property.

~~~
chungleong
Your car is parked in a public space. A dog could walk by and mark it. No
wanting something to happen is quite different from having a reasonable
expectation it won't happen.

Kyllo was decided by a narrow 5-4. That case was by far stronger. It involved
a person's home, first of all. And as I mentioned, it involved the use of
sophisticated equipment not generally possessed by the public. Without the
camera, the police would have to enter the house to obtain the same
information. One can therefore establish an equivalence between the two acts.
In the present case, such equivalence does not exist. The police could
conceivably just stare at the car for an hour or two. Chalking is thus only a
time saver. It's not a search.

------
knicholes
So who is going to create the app that helps cops track how long a vehicle has
been present in an area?

~~~
ben509
Already done in DC.
[https://twitter.com/howsmydrivingdc?lang=en](https://twitter.com/howsmydrivingdc?lang=en)

------
ravenstine
So then will they be violating the constitution when they place a ticket under
my windshield wipers?

~~~
oh_sigh
No, because presumbaly that doesn't count as a search, because they are not
gathering information by performing the act.

------
phyzome
It's also quite possible that this will be overturned. Seems kinda bonkers to
me.

------
nsuser3
Off-topic, but I really like that the website offers a text-only version
without tracking.

------
krisrm
Definitely not a lawyer, and I know a lot of places are moving to photo
enforcement of parking anyway, but it's hard for me to understand why a chalk
mark on a tire would be determined an "unreasonable" search by the court.

~~~
codezero
It really feels like a stretch if you ask me. But since the car is private
property, even though it's on a public road, the mark itself is an "action"
taken by the police against your property despite not having committed any
crime. I'm wondering how many other weird interpretations of this new ruling
one could come up with where it would apply to a bunch of other things.

~~~
efraim
Would a police officer looking at tire tread depth also be considered an
illegal search?

~~~
abruzzi
Not if they had reason to believe that your tires were worn out. The problem
is that your tire is being marked when there is no evidence that you will
overstay your parking. Everyone is marked indiscriminately. At least, thats
how I understood the description.

------
plcancel
No more having to clear parking cookies, at least.

------
wingspar
Perhaps they can chalk the curb instead? 'Bracket' the tire(s) with marks on
the curb, and a "code" indicating where the valve stem

------
viburnum
Better to just ban cars completely.

------
tsjq
someone please ELI5: what purpose does the chalking serve , in the parking
enforcement ?

~~~
schwede
Chalk on the tires marks the time the parking officer saw the car. If they
come back to that car, they can know it’s been parked there over the time
limit.

------
couchdive
But infrared pictures of your license plate ran through private corporations
databases are not.

The future is grand

------
dboreham
Always wondered about this..

..only kidding, of course I didn't. It's silly.

------
HillaryBriss
this is a big day for chalk stories on HN

------
jbob2000
Yep, chalk on your tires violates your rights. But if you are within 100 miles
of a border, we can search everything in your car and on your persons no
questions ask.

~~~
refurb
That's not actually true. You can be stopped and questioned about your
immigration status, but the CBP still need a warrant or probable cause to
search your vehicle. Same as if you were >100 miles away from the border.

~~~
jbob2000
You can determine a lot by stopping and asking someone about their immigration
status, probably way more than chalk on a tire would.

------
zelon88
The car has a unique identifier already. Several of them infact.

I don't see how chalking could have ever been an option on the table. Why do
you need to touch someone's car to identify it? A notepad and a pen would
suffice, no?

EXAMPLE ST. - 8am

-Green honda AAB-234

-Red Toyota 22F-554

-Blue Land Rover 9JG-532

EXAMPLE ST. - 9am

-Green Honda AAB-234 <\- Getting a ticket

-Yellow Nissan BB5-K25 <\- New, no ticket

-Blue Land Rover 9JG-532 <\- Getting a ticket

I mean it really is that easy and it takes about the same amount of time,
perhaps a little more diligence. It's sad that we need to govern for the
lowest common denominator. If the civil servants weren't so
lazy/disinterested/uneducated this wouldn't have cost the city as much money
as it did to resolve.

~~~
sfink
Try it. See how many plate numbers you can write down in half an hour. (To be
fair, you'd need to read and compare those plate numbers too.) Then see how
many tires you can mark with chalk on a stick in the same amount of time.

As a taxpayer, I'd rather not pay for the difference in staff.

