Twitter tale of van theft gets attention of politicians
Apparently, there is a simple way for an average citizen to get quick action from political leaders: generate a tweetstorm that goes viral.
That’s what Sharky Laguana did when he typed 37 tweets in quick succession, describing how a van was stolen from his San Francisco rental car company and how bizarre laws prevented him from getting it back. Incredibly, the only way he could retrieve his own van was by spotting it on the street, staking it out and eventually approaching the three people who appeared to be living inside it and lying that police were about to arrest them if they didn’t vacate the van.
In truth, police refused to help him at all — even an officer across the street from the parked van wouldn’t offer assistance. But the cunning Laguana did get his van back.
Within a week, Laguana’s story, which read like the world’s shortest thriller, had been retweeted nearly 1,000 times and had attracted the attention of city leaders, who know their constituents are beyond frustrated by car break-ins, homelessness and the collective shrug residents so often get from San Francisco police.
And it’s already getting some action.
Assemblyman Phil Ting has introduced a placeholder bill in the state Legislature related to Laguana’s story, though what the legislation will include remains to be seen.
“I’m still working out the details, but will definitely carry a bill this year to help companies protect their rental vehicles,” Ting, D-San Francisco, said in a statement. “No one should have to go through the frustrating, even dangerous, experience that Mr. Laguana did to recover his or her property.”
Supervisors Jane Kim and London Breed, both running for mayor, have also talked to Laguana and are interested in crafting local remedies.
“His story was very symbolic of an overall frustration of people throwing their hands up in the air saying, ‘The system just isn’t working,’ ” Kim said. “Lowlevel property crimes, including car break-ins, have gotten out of hand, and it feels like no one is helping.”
She said police officers should have offered to help Laguana. The Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division is investigating the incident.
Laguana has plenty of ideas for the politicians wanting to help him out. For starters, rental car companies aren’t allowed to activate their cars’ GPS devices unless the cars are seven days overdue or have been reported stolen. But you can’t report a vehicle stolen until it’s five days past due and you’ve sent a certified letter to the address on the rental contract. By the time the rental car company is allowed to check on a vehicle, Laguana said, it can be in a shipping container headed to the Middle East or well past the Mexican border.
Laguana wants rental car companies to have the right to activate GPS after a vehicle is three days overdue.
He’s also pushing for a law that would allow rental car companies that have reason to believe a renter has engaged in fraud or whose vehicles are 24 hours past due to give the vehicle’s license plate to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. The agency would then be able to boot or tow the car if it’s spotted. The fees would be paid by the rental car company. Seems logical to me. And, by the way, Laguana says he’s no conservative law-and-order guy, and he doesn’t want to see the arrest rate go up or homeless people living in vans get jail time.
In fact, he was a foster kid who was homeless when he moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s. He slept for a couple of weeks under a bench in Buena Vista Park before getting a $5-per-hour job, working the night shift checking in customers at the derelict Civic Center Hotel.
“I came here with nothing — a guitar and a backpack,” he said. “Everything I owned, I had on me, and I still had a hand free for a bagel.”
Now, he’s the 47-yearold married father of two kids, ages 9 and 13, and he lives in the Sunnyside neighborhood. He opened his rental car company, Bandago, in 2003. In his first 12 years of operation, he had just one vehicle stolen. Five have been swiped in the past month alone. Police say many stolen vehicles are used in the city’s car break-in epidemic.
“Solving this property crime issue is going to require solving a lot of different things and changing a lot of different laws,” he said. “I don’t want to see people wind up in jail unnecessarily, and I’m not even sure if jail is the right solution, but I also definitely don’t think the answer is ignoring crime. It’s having a huge, negative impact on people’s lives.” Sharky for mayor? P.S. I couldn’t help but ask Laguana one lingering question. Is that his real name? Yes, he said. Sharky is on his birth certificate. So it wasn’t made up?
“I get that all the time,” he said. “Here’s a little secret: They’re all made up. It wasn’t inscribed on a rock of granite and written in there by the finger of God and stamped on your forehead when you’re an embryo.”
Sounds like the makings of another tweetstorm.
Keeping it clean: Now that BART has committed to, gasp, cleaning its disgusting stations and trains, are BART board member Bevan Dufty and Supervisor Hillary Ronen out of their volunteer jobs?
As I told you in November, the two, who call themselves “partners in grime,” have been spending Wednesday mornings slapping on blue plastic gloves and wielding brooms to clean the nasty 16th Street Mission Station.
They’ve seen it all. And I do mean all. Mounds of trash. Dirty needles. Piles of feces. Dead pigeons.
They used the weekly cleanups to draw attention to how gross BART stations are, and it seems to have paid off.
The transit agency has pledged a cleanup throughout its system that will include placing attendants at station elevators (which are not, contrary to popular belief, restrooms), closing off parts of stations at night and assigning janitors to specific stations rather than moving them around.
When Dufty started his crusade at 16th Street Station in October, a janitor was working there just six shifts out of a possible 14 each week. (There are two janitorial shifts per day.) Now, all 14 shifts will be covered, and some will even have two janitors at a time.
Dufty and Ronen said the station is much cleaner.
“There’s still stuff to pick up, but now you’re kind of hunting for it,” Dufty said.
The two want to shift their focus to social services and ensuring that homeless people and drug addicts at the station receive help. But they’ll probably cease their weekly cleanups there soon. Dufty said he’ll reassign himself to Civic Center Station, while Ronen will be “moving on to something else.”
“I’m going to miss it,” she said. “It’s my favorite part of the week.”
If picking up trash and needles at a BART station is her favorite part of the week, what does that say about spending time in City Hall?
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf