Columbus police will stop marking tires with chalk to determine whether a vehicle has been moved after a federal appeals court ruled that the practice amounts to an unwarranted search.

The Columbus city attorney’s office advised the Columbus Division of Police on Tuesday to stop the practice, which officers use to enforce a city law that requires cars parked on a street to be moved every 72 hours.

An email directing officers to stop the practice was sent to the entire division on Tuesday by Deana R. Leffler, the police legal adviser with the city attorney's office, with the approval of interim Police Chief Tom Quinlan. "We are looking into this case and its impact further, however, from this point forward, the practice of chalking tires must cease," the email stated.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled Monday in a case that originated in Saginaw, Michigan, that marking a car’s tires violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches. Besides Ohio and Michigan, the court’s jurisdiction includes Kentucky and Tennessee.

The appeals court’s majority opinion, which overturned a lower court's ruling, likened marking a tire to police installing a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car, which the U.S. Supreme Court restricted in a 2012 decision.

Chalking tires to enforce parking rules is a long-standing practice in cities across the country.

Columbus has a two-pronged approach to enforcement: through police and through its parking-services division.

Parking enforcement officers stopped using chalk to mark vehicles last year, when the city acquired license-plate readers to keep track of vehicle movement, said Robert Ferrin, assistant director for parking services.

The parking division has nine license-plate readers, which are attached to vehicles that patrol areas such as the Short North, where drivers are required to pay to park on residential streets that don’t have parking meters.

That amounts to digital marking, but Ferrin said he is unsure whether the court’s ruling prohibits that as well.

“We’re definitely looking at that decision and does it affect anything we do,” he said.

Columbus police use chalk to mark tires or place an “abandoned notice card” on vehicles that have been left in the same place for longer than 72 hours, said Sgt. Chantay Boxill, the division’s spokeswoman.

Boxill said police will stop marking with chalk, in response to the court decision and at the recommendation of legal counsel in the city attorney’s office. The division could look for other ways to track whether vehicles are moved, such as recording the location on a body camera, she said.

Last year, the Columbus City Council voted to change city law so that any car parked in the same space for at least 72 hours had to be moved at least 75 feet, or about four car lengths. The 72-hour rule had been in place for years, but city law previously had not defined how far a vehicle had to be moved.

“I think that they’re going to come up with different ways" to enforce parking rules, Boxill said.

Information from the Associated Press and the Washington Post was included in this story.

rrouan@dispatch.com

@RickRouan