Wishful Thinking

The City not only tickets stolen cars, it painted a curb red
while a car was parked, then issued it a ticket.

Yesterday's post was about San Francisco ticketing stolen cars, rather than attempting to reunite them with their owners. Mayor London Breed reacted immediately to the Chronicle article:[bold added]

Mayor London Breed on Wednesday ordered the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency to stop ticketing stolen vehicles and to instead notify their owners that their cars had been found...

Breed ordered the SFMTA and the Police Department to work together to implement a system in which stolen cars are identified and recovered. The two departments have a 45-day deadline to respond to the directive.

Just because London Breed is the Mayor doesn't mean that she's in charge:

San Franciscans will have to wait, however, before the directive becomes reality. City laws governing the use of surveillance technology — such as license plate readers — require multiple reviews by the city’s Committee on Information Technology, as well as a signoff by a supervisorial committee and a full vote of the Board of Supervisors.

The problem of bureacratic obstinacy exists in all governments, no matter who's on top, because bureacrats act in their own self interest, not in the interest of the chief executives or the people who elected them. According to public choice theory

There is abundant evidence that governments throughout history and throughout the world do not do what they are supposed to do. In some cases the government employees do not do anything useful. In others they will not do their job unless they are paid specifically to do a task. The English language calls this payment a bribe but this is a misnomer in that the word bribe is also used to designate a payment made to a government employee to do something illegal. The payment that is mentioned above is one made to get the government employee to do something that is not only legal but is also his or her job.

We wish Mayor Breed all the best, but there's no way she'll have her integrated database up and running in 45 days. The Transportation and Law Enforcement bureaucracies will ensure that it will occur at double that length of time, if at all.