We got with our joint labor-management team, and we presented to the city council. From there, we took it to the chief of police. He wasn't too happy about us taking part of the police department's job, so he said he'd give us a pilot program for seven months in only a certain section of the city. In that short period of time, we recovered 1,651 vehicles. We saved the city $16,259, and also we relieved seven full-time officers of their duties. Instead of going out and picking up stolen vehicles, they could do something more important. Because we did a good job, the police chief gave us authority to do it city wide.

A lot of the officers who had been there 15 or 20 years fought the change. They did not want to do it, so when they would go to pick up vehicles, they would take four, five, or six hours to do it. I was in a special operations unit, and we were the guinea pigs for anything new. Along with another special operations officer, I trained about 50 percent of our officers and helped them reduce their total time to 30 minutes to an hour. Now everybody is happy to do it.

One thing was really rewarding. Not only did we save money for the city, but usually when we do traffic control, like parking tickets, we're the most hated people there are. They love the police, but they don't like us. It's such a good feeling to call people within one and two days to say, "We have your vehicle. It's in one piece. It's not stripped. It's not wrecked." The public finally tells you "thank you," and they mean it.