Fox, William Frankovic and Eugene Galves Sr. are suing the Police Department, alleging that about 45,000 disabled people have been denied their statutory and constitutional right to receive police services because of the department's failure to administer the parking enforcement program properly to benefit the disabled.

Frankovic and Galves are volunteers with the program, Fox said. Fox resigned from it four months ago.

The new rules, he said, mean "You no longer can write a citation if someone in or around the vehicle could be the driver; you no longer can ask for identification, and if you are in the process of writing a citation and someone who could be the driver approaches, you have to leave."

The new Police Department policy requires parking enforcement volunteers to call 911 and ask for a uniformed officer when a driver of a car to be cited is present. "It takes an average of 20 minutes for officers to arrive," Fox said. "You can't keep a driver there for 20 minutes."

"Their reasoning," Fox said of police administrators, "is concern about volunteer safety, because they don't want confrontation. But the fact is thousands of citations have been written. Hundreds of (disabled parking) placards have been confiscated without incident in the four or five years of the program. It just doesn't happen. No one's been assaulted."

Fox said that about one-third of 50 people recently cited were using placards of deceased relatives or friends. It's a percentage that reflects the illegal use of placards, he said.

Attorney Shawn Luiz filed the class-action suit this month in federal court.

In a statement issued through Police Department spokeswoman Michelle Yu, Chief Boisse Correa said, "The disabled parking volunteer program provides an important community service, and changes in the program were made at the command level for safety reasons." The chief had no further comment.

The program started with 28 volunteers but the number now stands at 17, said Fox.

In 1998, then-Chief Lee Donohue hailed the success of the pilot program, saying that volunteers had issued 3,300 citations over two years.

In 2003, Councilman Mike Gabbard introduced a bill modeled after the disabled parking volunteer enforcement program allowing volunteers to issue parking, littering and abandoned vehicle citations. The start of the second volunteer program, scheduled for October 2004, has been delayed, according to Gabbard's office.

The disabled parking enforcement volunteers, who wear vests identifying their duties, had expected a portion of the $120,000 in Gabbard's bill that went to the department to be dedicated to getting them uniforms like the ones used by city parking-meter employees, said Fox.