East Hampton, NY – Local Police Chief Wants New York Law To Curb Misuse of Handicapped Permits

East Hampton, NY – In a village where the summer crowds overwhelm the number of available parking spaces, parking permits for the handicapped parking permits have been frequently misused. Until recently, that misuse has gone mostly undetected.

But in the last few weeks, East Hampton Village Police Chief Jerry Larsen has confiscated 10 permits that were being used by people who were not handicapped.

In each case, Chief Larsen said he would ask the driver of the vehicle that was parked in a space reserved for handicapped parkers for his or her driver’s license to verify that the permit had been issued to that person. In most of the cases, the permit had been issued to someone else, he said, adding that one permit was a homemade fake.

But because there is no central nationwide, or even statewide, data base of permits, Chief Larsen said that there is no way for police to confirm that a permit is valid, without calling the municipality that issued it. Often that requires waiting until that municipality’s offices are open during normal business hours, he said, meaning that at night and on weekends, when those offices are closed, police cannot verify whether permits are valid.

“Right now you could make one of these, which is happening all over the country, and hang it from your mirror. There’s no way to verify if it’s real or not,” Chief Larsen said last week as he displayed a permit.

As a result, Chief Larsen requested by letter on July 28 that all East End towns provide his department with information on all of their active permits. He has set up a data base that can be accessed by any police department 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by calling village police. He said he would like to push for a law that would force New York State to form a statewide data base of permits, and he said he has spoken with officials in Albany who have told him they have no plans for creating such a data base, nor any incentive to do so.

“If there was a law that mandated them to do it they would,” Chief Larsen said. “It really should be national. I’m starting locally and trying to work up to the state, so just like you can run a license plate number, you could run a handicapped parking permit number.”

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles gives the blank blue handicapped parking permits to each municipality with instructions on how to issue them to their residents, but it’s up to the individual municipality to keep track of the permits it issues.

Chief Larsen said that ever since he was a police officer on patrol, the misuse of handicapped parking permits has been one of his major pet peeves. While checking on permits in the last few weeks, he encountered one person who was using the permit of a recently deceased parent, he said.

To keep the project growing beyond the East End, Chief Larsen said he has organized a meeting with the Suffolk County Handicapped Advisory Committee to discuss a countywide data base of permits. He also created an e-mail address, [email protected], so that towns can e-mail information on any new permits they issue, stolen permits or lost permits.

The misuse of parking permits seems to be a common theme this summer, as East Hampton Town Police charged four people with felonies for the forgery of beach parking stickers in July.