Meter maids and police in San Francisco, California are more interested in issuing parking and traffic tickets than attempting to solve the crime of vehicle theft. Michelle Vuckovich, 37, learned this when her 2000 Honda Civic was stolen on September 26. She filed a police report and ensured it would be listed as stolen on police databases. Within an hour, a meter maid issued the car a ticket on Union Street without noticing that it had just been reported stolen, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The handheld computers that meter maids used to issue parking tickets failed to check the stolen car database, as Vuckovich's stolen Honda received a total of twenty-nine citations without any effort on the part of police or the meter maids to track down and recover the vehicle.

Vuckovich called the police immediately after she received the first batch of tickets in the mail. When law enforcement was not interested in helping to find the car, she set out to follow the trail of tickets to locate her car on her own. Vuckovich found it just two blocks from the police station. Officers arriving on the scene an hour later declined to make any attempt to identify the thieves responsible.