Challenging an Allegedly Unlawful Vehicle Impound During an Arrest

Attorney Answer

Police may lawfully tow a vehicle because the driver was arrested and taken into custody — even if the car was legally parked, the registration was current, and another licensed driver was standing there.

Cal. Veh. Code § 22651(h)(1) authorizes an officer to remove a vehicle when the person driving or in control of it is arrested and taken into custody. That authority does not depend on the vehicle being parked illegally or the registration being expired, which is why the code you saw online lines up with what happened. That does not necessarily end the inquiry — whether a particular tow was reasonable in the circumstances can still be challenged — but the arrest itself is a recognized statutory basis for it.

The useful news is that California gives you a formal way to contest it. The vehicle's registered or legal owner is entitled to a post-storage hearing to determine whether the storage was valid (Cal. Veh. Code § 22852). The request can be made in person, in writing, or by telephone, and once requested the hearing must be held within 48 hours, excluding weekends and holidays. That hearing is where the arguments about the licensed driver on scene and the legal parking spot belong.

On suing the department: whether an impound crosses from authorized into an unreasonable seizure supporting a civil rights claim is a fact-intensive question that turns on the officers' actual justification for towing rather than releasing the car. California courts analyze that under the Fourth Amendment's community-caretaking exception, and Halajian v. D & B Towing (2012) 209 Cal.App.4th 1 — a published California Court of Appeal decision, so binding on California trial courts — is where the framework lives: the analysis asks whether the vehicle was safely and securely parked, whether its registration was valid, and whether an owner with a valid driver's license was available to take it. Halajian upheld the impound in that case precisely because none of those three factors was present, which is why a situation like yours, where all three are present, is the weakest version of the caretaking justification. Be clear-eyed about what that does and does not give you: the decision does not hold that an available licensed driver by itself defeats an impound, only that those three factors are what the analysis turns on. That is a separate track from the hearing, and slower.

This one has a hard, short deadline. The post-storage hearing must be requested within 10 days of the date on the impound notice — a statutory cutoff, not a courtesy — and storage fees keep accruing daily in the meantime. Because the clock runs from the date printed on your particular notice, have a California attorney confirm your deadline rather than estimating it, and get the request in immediately.

What you can do

1. Find the impound or storage notice and note the exact date printed on it — that date starts the clock. 2. Request the post-storage hearing right away, in writing if you can, and keep a copy plus proof of when you sent it. 3. Gather what supports your position: proof of current registration, the parking location, and the identity and license status of the driver who was present. 4. Ask the storing agency in writing which specific subdivision of § 22651 it relied on to justify the tow. 5. Consult a California attorney now — both to confirm the hearing deadline and to assess whether a separate civil claim over the impound and the resulting job loss is worth pursuing.