Imagine your car is stolen from right outside your home. You do the right thing, file a police report, and wait patiently. But the police can’t find your car. As the days turn into weeks, you begin to lose hope. Then, you get a call from a towing yard. The good news is they have your car. The bad news is that you’re on the hook for a whole pile of tickets and storage fees too.

Oakland, California reportedly sees 14,000 stolen cars dumped–every six months. Worse, the Oakland Department of Transportation will ticket those cars for being parked illegally on the street, but doesn’t bother looking up whether they’ve been reported stolen. After they rack up enough tickets, the city calls a towing company. It’s usually the towing company that finally bothers to look up the true owner, because they want to get paid.

 Ricardo Vindiola, an Oakland city worker, revealed how the situation often plays out. “You have to pay a towing, you have to pay the fees and the storage, and you have to pay the tickets, and you have to pay more than the value of the car.”

How California’s letting the owners of stolen vehicles down

To be blunt, this is pretty poor service from a government department that is supposedly set up to serve taxpayers. Stolen car owners may be without a vehicle for weeks or months. Then they must pay tickets and storage to get their car back. The city will eventually pay the owner back, but that process also takes months. What’s more, that means taxpayers are on the hook to pay whatever fees the tow company demands.

Oakland finally convened a Civil Grand Jury, which stated the obvious. “If OakDOT could immediately identify a parked stolen vehicle, it would be beneficial, not only to the vehicle owner, but also would save the city time and money by not having to rescind and dismiss tickets.”

Most cities’ parking enforcement run vehicles’ plates anyway. That’s because you’ll get a bigger ticket for parking in a public space with lapsed registration. It’s absurd that a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, Oakland parking enforcement can’t run plates against the “hotlist” of stolen vehicles.

The city claims its trying to update its “parking citation management system” to do exactly this.