I read a fun story here about a lady who falsely reported someone with a disability placard as fraudulently using handicap parking so I thought I would share my story.

I used to work in private security, every property that I can remember had disabled parking. Now if you park in these spots without a placard we write a "ticket" of sorts in most places. It basically says if you park in the handicap again we can tow you at your own expense (note police can also randomly drive by at anytime and write a $300 handicap violation). Now we get the wannabe disability police who see someone exit their car and have a placard, but since they aren't missing both their legs they assume that the person isn't disabled enough and will come and report handicap fraud to one of us in security. Essentially we tell them that qualified people have issued them a placard and we do not have the authority to second guess that. Most go away saying that they're going to look into it and we warn them against harassing a fellow employee. Most times nothing ever comes of it.

Well one property I was at had at least 90 security cameras, covering the parking lot, interior everything. One poor lady who had been the target of the building's "disability police" came to my desk highly upset and showed me an official looking card someone left on her windshield. It basically warned of the criminal penalties of handicap fraud. It also had a link to where she could go online to "correct" the problem. I knew something was off and told her not to worry about it and I would find out who put it there. I had worked in this building for 3 years at this point and was the lead security officer for the building. Somewhat similar to a policeman who knows his neighborhood I already had a good idea of who did it and when. However since I was going to be reviewing camera footage and gathering evidence (outside cameras provide a wide overview and aren't good for identifying faces, the interior cameras are needed for that), I contact corporate security for approval as I may spend half the day investigating this matter.

Well, my instincts were almost spot on as far as when it happened. I caught the time someone was over her windshield in the morning in under 30 minutes. Now I thought it was one particular employee in IT. It was an IT employee, but not the one I had guessed. The client I did security for had problems with theft from the IT area in the past and their areas are saturated with cameras. I get him coming back inside and I then back up from before he went out. I can see the bogus criminal warning he printed out sitting on his desk face up for a couple minutes after grabbing it from the printer tray, then walking outside with it. I checked the link that he had provided online and it looked like something a web developer would slap together hastily. I wrote it all up, packaged all the evidence together and sent it to corporate management and human resources.

Remember that there had been a few thefts awhile back? At the end of the week the associate who I caught comes and tells me how ridiculous it is that I can't catch missing laptops, but I can catch him. As I tried to briefly tell him what updates had been made to CCTV and the like since the last theft he cut me off with some not so nice words and left.

Edit: had to clarify the IT guy’s website in the comments. The website had this woman’s license plate and car make prominently displayed at the top of the page and essentially said that her info had been reported to the Secretary of State (known as the DMV in other states), and the Secretary’s police agency. The link also said that the placard would need to be destroyed as criminal charges would be brought if the placard was found again. It was a single page with no links. The fact that the page did not say “this is (law enforcement name)” or try to get money in the form of a fine is why it wasn’t considered more then harassment, but to me it really did ride the line of trying to impersonate a law enforcement agency. To my knowledge the lady never looked at the webpage which is probably best.

TL;DR Women harassed for using disabled parking, I go full Sherlock Holmes to find the culprit.