Pointless, Wasteful Harassment in a Costa Mesa Park

Picking up from where my last Orange County adventure left off, I’ve been recuperating from a C2 fracture that required a lengthy hospitalization by riding my road bike.

The routine involves taking my bicycle to Fairview Park in Costa Mesa in my truck and using the facility as a base for multiple short rides throughout the day.

Back in July, at Fairview Park sitting in my truckbed with the tailgate facing the lawn, I was taking a break between rides in the shade of my truckbed topper. It was the hottest day of the year so far. My bicycle was lying in the grass adjacent to the parking spot. Along comes an Officer from Costa Mesa PD who tells me that I can’t leave my bike there. Knowing this to be untrue, I explain my surprise as I’ve been parking my bike this way for years at this park. It has also been my observed understanding of the usual and customary use of the lawn area in the park. 

He insisted that the law was clear. All bicycles must be stored in the bicycle racks provided. I told him that the racks were optional and that I chose to watch my bike personally as it is more secure and saves me time lost performing a useless act. Out of the blue he asks me if I am homeless as if trying to instigate a confrontation. Failing to do so he took my driver’s license and sat in his SUV for about 10 minutes. He returned with a citation for illegal parking and disorderly conduct. When he appeared shocked at my refusal to argue with him about it, I simply told him that flapping my jaw at him would be unproductive as this was not the correct venue to air a complaint about the citation.

Still annoyed that I didn’t have a meltdown over a parking citation, he informed me that I was being trespassed from the park and then sat there cooping while I packed up my truck and left.

My first response to this was to look up the statutes cited at the Costa Mesa website and read the text. There was no such parking prohibition in the cited statute. But there *was* a scamworthy line in that section automatically upgrading ANY infraction committed within the park to a misdemeanor offense, calling it Disorderly Conduct. This creates leverage to reduce the probability that anyone will fight the outrageous fine, fearing the definite possibility that a conviction could land them in jail over a parking ticket! Hiring a lawyer to fight it would cost thousands of dollars, so they’ve got their victims boxed in.

Having waited over two months for the court date, I appeared at the time ordered expecting to simply explain the situation to a Traffic Court Judge. Instead, after three hours of waiting in a courtroom, I was hustled into the hall by an attorney representing Costa Mesa who gave me their offer to resolve this. Pay them $275 and I could go home today with this settled. The plea to her common sense that I shouldn’t have to pay anything since I hadn’t violated any statutes fell on deaf ears. She tried to tell me that it would be impossible to fight this in Court without an attorney as I knew nothing about the complex procedures involved in defending a case before a jury. Additionally, I would have to pay Court costs on top of the fine and they planned to ask for jail time. 

The prison benches available in the hall while waiting for the courtroom to open had me wandering around reading signs before the courtroom opened and the one about attorney and litigant behavioral standards did not escape my attention.

I censored what I wanted to say and told her that I would see her in Court. 

She launched into another warning about defending myself with the intensity of a desperate car salesman on the Harbor Boulevard of Cars. This was 69 days after the citation was written. Back in the courtroom, the clerk, the Judge and even the courtroom security officer all launched into individual warnings along the same lines. At which time I asked them to schedule the trial. The Judge set a pre-trial hearing to handle discovery and scheduling for a week out. Once again appearing as ordered, it took four hours of sitting around in the appointed courtroom. Another Costa Mesa attorney filling in for the first approached me and handed me his Evidence List. Asking him if he’d like a copy of my Discovery Request List and Evidence List he said, “No” and sat down. I was called to the podium and asked one more time, once each by the Judge and the Security Officer if I still planned on representing myself. The guard said he’d get me some paperwork to sign acknowledging that I knew I had the right to representation. Signing that, the Judge smiled and quickly told me that the case had been dismissed by the prosecution. The Prosecutor had filed a motion admitting that they had no case.

So it was just a shakedown from the start that they pushed up to the very last moment that they could without having to show their hand. This provided the maximum retribution available in their extrajudicial punishment of law-abiding citizens via frivolous and unconstitutional malicious prosecution. The lawyers are probably on salary with nothing better to do. The cop never had to appear. It costs them almost nothing to run this scam, and they probably get a lot of folks who don’t want to risk being railroaded into a jail sentence to just pay.

In any case the length of time they spent sweating me to accept a guilty plea made no sense from a reasonable prosecutorial perspective. There were no facts in the case that *could* be recanted. It wasn’t a whodunnit. They knew that no such law existed but wanted me to admit to its violation to make this go away. The account of the facts of the case provided by the Officer and his body cam matched my own tighter than a trio played by musicians of the sort skilled enough to make multiple instruments sound like one. 

[Where was the bike placed? Where was I at the time? When did this occur? How was the bike oriented relative to me, my truck and the park?]

The only dispute was about whether the actions in question were prohibited. Exactly how much legal analysis of a parking ordinance was required to conclude that I was correct, saving time and money for both parties and the Court itself? Could this court-clogging enterprise be why the traditional 30 day interval between citation and court date has now swollen to 69 days? This scam was designed purely as extrajudicial punishment of the homeless. Their lame excuses provide less ass coverage than a Newport Beach string bikini. If seasoned attorneys actually require 76 days to figure out what 35 words of statute mean, how are visitors to the park equipped to interpret the rule in a timely enough manner to avoid harassment when it’s not even posted on a sign at the park?

Allen 

P.S. Could this old Rockford episode have been their inspiration?

About Allen Saul

Allen Saul is one of the Orange Juice Blog's "unhoused correspondents."