The trail from a parking ticket to jail time can be a winding one, but some connections are worth looking at. In the case of parking tickets, not paying two tickets leads to the state suspending the car's registration. The top three most heavily ticketed areas also had the most unpaid citations. In Districts 7, only 58 percent of the tickets were paid. Vehicles can also be towed if their owners don't pay the fines, but registration is canceled before towing occurs.
Police seize the vehicle's plates if registration is canceled.
And if there are plates, the color of the sticker is a giveaway as well. When you see flashing lights and someone pulled over in certain parts of town, it's a fair guess that the car was stopped for lack of plates. A racial breakdown from 1996 showed that 54 percent of those tickets went to African Americans, whose population makes up just under one-third of the city as a whole. Driving while suspended accounted for 10,843 African-American arrests in 1996, while only 6,122 whites were charged. Total citations last year for suspended license were 33,979.