Patrol Targets Abuse of Handicapped Parking : Transportation: City unit tracks down thousands of drivers who illegally use permits for the disabled to avoid putting money in meters.

At the end of a recent workday, a trickle of county employees returned to their cars parked at the Hill Street overpass in downtown Los Angeles, unaware that they were being watched by two members of a special parking enforcement team.

About half of the two dozen vehicles had blue handicapped permits hanging from rearview mirrors or lying on dashboards, allowing their owners to park free all day at two-hour meters that cost everyone else $1.50 an hour.

“That car’s placard is registered to a woman. Let’s go,” Jerome Holmes told his partner, Ernest Dunton, pointing to a man getting into a red car. Undeterred by the driver’s stuttered excuses, Dunton confiscated the placard--which was registered to the man’s sister--and wrote him a $330 ticket and a $30 meter violation.

The tag was the 2,225th confiscated by members of the city’s 3-year-old disabled-placard task force, one of only a few such units in the country. The city crew has issued about 13,300 citations for misused or expired placards, totaling $4.5 million in fines.

But such fraud is so widespread, officials say, that they nab only a tiny fraction of abusers. “It’s like putting a thumb in the leaking dike,” said Holmes. Still, when they catch someone, he said, it feels good and “sends a message someone’s out here checking.”

The placards, first handed out in 1983, have become a free parking pass for anyone who can get their hands on them, officers say. Abuses are occurring nationwide. Officials in New York, Florida, Maryland, Virginia and Indiana are struggling to curb the practice by using volunteer parking monitors or charging the disabled to park at meters, among other methods.

Criminal prosecution, such as the recent cases against the UCLA football players who pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, are rare. The bulk of the city’s enforcement is left to the six-officer task force the Los Angeles City Council launched in July 1996.

Even with four new officers expected to be added early next year, the task of patrolling 41,000 parking meters and thousands of handicapped spaces over the city’s 469 square miles is daunting, said task force supervisor Capt. Donn Howard.

“We can’t prevent it, we can’t stop it, but we can try to deter it,” he said.

The tags are issued to individuals, not to vehicles. So to slap scofflaws with the stiffest fines, the team must catch them as they enter or leave their cars. Many cheaters drop a single coin into a parking meter to deflect attention, or linger in their cars to make sure no one is watching. Some sprint away if they see officers approaching.

“They’ve burned me a couple of times,” said Holmes, who has been on the task force for three years and in regular parking enforcement for 10 years before that. Now, he added, “I know all the tricks.”

Even so, getting placards is far easier than policing them.

Forms from the state Department of Motor Vehicles can be downloaded from the agency’s Web site and returned by mail. They require only a signature by a physician, chiropractor, optometrist or other medical provider.

The DMV does not verify the certifications, said Evan Nossoff, a department spokesman, relying instead on medical providers--and applicants--to tell the truth. Slightly more than 1 million placards have been issued. About 2.5 million California residents are classified as disabled.

Enforcing legal placard use is largely left to local authorities. Nossoff acknowledged that enforcement probably takes a back seat to efforts to curb drunk driving and other more dangerous violations.

“You are talking about something that is labor-intensive to enforce,” he said.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick said she is appalled by the lengths to which healthy people will go to take advantage of a parking system created to assist the disabled.

“It’s so incredibly selfish,” said Chick, the former chairwoman of the city’s Public Safety Committee. The parking fines, she added, should be even higher.

“A lot of folks do pass them [placards] along” to unauthorized people, said Mitch Pomerantz, a city administrator charged with seeing that Los Angeles complies with federal disability requirements. “How to address it, I’m not sure. There has to be something done on the state level.”

The 55-year-old driver Dunton cited on Hill Street near Temple Street this week said he didn’t see the harm in using his sister’s disabled parking tag.

“I wasn’t here all day,” he said. “I don’t know what the purpose of them doing this is, short of a reaction to the UCLA football players.”

That attitude is not unusual, say parking officers.

“We have even caught lawyers, doctors, policemen,” Holmes said. “Everyone treats it as if it’s a harmless little thing, but they don’t understand. . . . This is an everyday struggle” for the disabled.

Most legitimate placard users are grateful when they are questioned.

“It’s all right for them to check. Relations aren’t supposed to be using it,” said Gerardo Peralta, 73, a county employee and 20-year placard user also parked on Hill Street.

Howard said his officers pay close attention to areas where parking is limited or expensive, such as the downtown garment district, as well as government buildings and college campuses. They also look for areas where large numbers of handicapped placards are seen. That is what drew them to the Hill Street overpass.

UCLA is not the only school where students have misused the placards.

Last week, Holmes and Dunton staked out Jefferson Street in front of the USC dental school, an area known as “placard city” before the team cracked down on illegal users. Their target on this day: a student using a parking tag issued to a woman born in 1915.

They caught the young woman as she got out of her car, confiscating the tag she admitted belonged to her grandmother.

Suspected misuse of placards can be reported by calling (323) 224-6591.