David Andreatta

@david_andreatta

Right now, there are 21,575 vehicles with so many unpaid parking and red-light tickets in Rochester that they're eligible to be immobilized with a wheel boot, according to the city's Parking Violations Bureau.

Sarah Sampson’s ride, a blue Toyota RAV4, isn't one of them. Never has been.

Yet for the second time in a year, Sampson, a 24-year-old physician's assistant from Spencerport, ended her shift at Highland Hospital recently to find her car booted.

"It's extremely frustrating," Sampson said.

If there were any question that people rely too heavily on technology and not enough on their own brains these days, Sampson's story is proof they do.

Not everyone, of course, but certainly City of Rochester Parking Enforcement Officer No. 2348.

No. 2348 — the city won’t divulge his name for privacy reasons — spends his days hunting for scofflaws and booting their vehicles.

He does this by driving around town with an ALPR — automated license plate reader — on the roof of his van that photographs the license plates of every vehicle he passes and instantly runs the images against a database of scofflaws in its memory bank.

When the ALPR finds a match, it alerts No. 2348 through a dashboard computer. Then No. 2348 affixes a big orange sticker to the driver's side window of the offending vehicle like a scarlet letter and applies the boot. Together, they nab about 10 cars a day this way.

You might say No. 2348 is the brawn and the ALPR is the eyes and brains. But the ALPR's lenses aren't real eyes, and its memory bank isn't a real brain.

That's why No. 2348's eyes and brain should have kicked in when the ALPR detected Sampson's license plate on Dec. 1 around 5:30 p.m. on Alpine Street.

Her license plate, in fact, did not match the plate on the scofflaw list that the ALPR's eyes and brain swore were the same. Her plate was one digit off from the offending plate — EWG 6090 — which belongs to a woman with five tickets and $545 in outstanding fines.

But instead of using his eyes and brain, No. 2348 went about his job like an automaton, writing "EWG 6090" and his badge number on the scarlet letter and applying the boot.

"This has happened twice now," Sampson said. "What's most irritating to me is they don't double-check before they put a boot on. You'd think someone would check with their eyes."

What's worse is that parking enforcement officers on boot detail travel in pairs as a safety precaution.

That means two officers — No. 2348 and a partner whose badge number wasn't on the scarlet letter — didn't look at Sampson's plate before subjecting her to 12 hours of unnecessary inconvenience.

She hitched a ride home to Spencerport with a friend. She spent three hours on the phone with operators at Paylock, the private company under city contract to provide boots and process payments, convincing them she wasn't a scofflaw.

Despite claiming to be a 24-hour service, Paylock couldn't get anyone to remove the boot until the following morning.

The last time Sampson's car got booted was Dec. 8, 2015. She was parked on Rockingham Street, near the hospital, and found the boot after her shift. The same ordeal ensued.

"Shame on them," Laura Miller, the city's parking director, said of the officers. "They're going to do it better next time."

Miller said officers are supposed to verify ALRP data before applying boots, and that this story would reinforce that training. She added, however, that she's never fielded a similar complaint.

News of license plate reader errors appears rare. Perhaps the best recorded error was in Prairie Village, Kansas, in 2014, when police surrounded an innocent husband and wife after their license plate was mistaken for that of a stolen car.

Readers have been used here since 2010, when the city began booting vehicles with three or more parking tickets 90 days overdue. In late 2014, the program was expanded to include red-light ticket scofflaws.

That year, the city booted 2,411 vehicles. In 2015, the number jumped to 3,582. Drivers have 48 hours to pay up before their car is towed and impounded. The enforcement has netted millions of dollars for the city, which estimates 85 percent of drivers pay.

This year to date, parking enforcement officers have immobilized 3,040 vehicles, according to the bureau.

How often did officers look at the license plates of the cars they were booting? One can only guess.

David Andreatta is a Democrat and Chronicle columnist. He can be reached at dandreatta@gannett.com.