This isn’t the most serious outcome from Seattle’s ill-advised flirtation with defund the police activism but it may be the most embarrassing. The city recently realized it will need to refund 7 months worth of parking tickets because the civilians who’d issued them were never granted proper authority to do so.
For seven months, the city’s parking enforcement officers were writing tickets even though they were not authorized to do so.
As a result, about 200,000 parking tickets issued by the officers will now either be voided or refunded to those who have paid them after the city missed a crucial step with how parking enforcement officers issue tickets…
Last August, the Seattle City Council unanimously voted to move parking enforcement officers from the Seattle Police Department to the Seattle Department of Transportation following calls to reimagine policing in the city.
But now the city says those officers didn’t have the proper authority to issue tickets.
About 100,000 of those tickets had already been paid so all of that money, estimated at $4.5 to $5 million, will need to be refunded. And that may not be all because the same parking enforcement officers also ordered a lot of cars to be towed.