The Corpus Christi Caller-Times
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Officers ordered 13 vehicles towed in past 30 days
Corpus Christi police ordered 13 cars towed from drivers stopped without insurance for the 30-day period ending April 25, continuing a trend of fairly-low impound totals since the new program began earlier this year.
Officers ordered 19 cars be impounded in February through the new policy, according to police data, and the number of cars towed during each month has hovered in the mid-teens since Feb. 1 when officials began impounding cars of uninsured drivers to deter them from driving without insurance.
Police Capt. Todd Green said officers have been forced to take a cautious approach in ordering vehicles to be impounded because currently there is no way to instantly know whether someone really forgot his or her insurance card. A planned Department of Public Safety database of drivers’ insurance coverage accessible to police departments statewide almost certainly will add to officers’ ability to enforce the law and ultimately impound vehicles, Green said, but that system isn’t expected to be online until the summer.
The database originally was scheduled to be online by the start of the year.
“I think the numbers show that we’re not going out of our way to impound every vehicle we come across,” Green said. “We may have doubts about whether (drivers) have insurance or not. ... Right now, if we don’t have a record of someone being cited or convicted in the past, it’s up to the officer’s discretion to impound.”
Texas Department of Insurance spokesman Jerry Hagins said the database now is scheduled to be up and running by the summer.
“Texas has never done anything like this before,” he said. “It is a brand new program and requires the merging of three very large databases. The size of the project has pushed it back a little.”
Once completed, officers will have near-instant access to insurance, driver’s license and registration information from their in-cruiser computers.
Despite towing fewer than 20 cars per month, Green said the program has been a success in decreasing the number of drivers without insurance.
“We’ve heard stories from different insurance companies around town that when we announced we’re starting to tow, sales increased,” Green said. “And that’s the intention behind the policy in the first place — to encourage people to go out and get insurance behind their vehicle ... not to see how many cars we can tow.”
The plan was first brought up publicly at a Nov. 13 City Council meeting approving a resolution that gave the department authority to firm up a towing policy. Texas law requires drivers to have at least liability coverage.
As many as one in three drivers in Nueces County do not have insurance, compared with one in five drivers lacking insurance statewide, according to police data.
The city’s impound lot at 2600 Holly Road has a capacity of 545 vehicles during fair weather, officials have said. That number is cut to 375 spaces after heavy rain.
Copyright 2008 The Corpus Christi Caller-Times