Ironpony -- You're not understanding how bad guys work and how the police exploit that to the police's advantage.
Bad guys work on the principle of random chance. For instance, if you break into houses, spend less than two minutes in the house, your chances of getting caught are lower than if you spend ten minutes in the house. This system works well even with house alarms because it's based upon a sound principle -- that there is no police officer within two minutes or less for response time. Of course, if there is a cop parked around the corner, you're screwed. You get caught by a random chance.
The police know this, and put in two systematic checks to stop this. The first is random patrols. There is absolutely no way to predict where police cruisers will be. The second is requiring pawn shops to do various things to help identify hot property.
As a result of systematic checks and a couple of other factors, the crime rate has gone from 747.1 crimes per 100,000 people in 1993 to 386.9 crimes per 100,000 people in 2012. By amassing massive amounts of data, extensive use of computers, and hard work, the police are in the position to jump on someone when random chance works in their favor.
Motor vehicle theft has shown a decline, in part because of these cameras. There's no way to duck this massive database of information. What you, as a writer, has to do is figure out ways to out-smart this system. You've been given two viable ways to reduce the chances of getting caught by random chance. The long-term parking has a couple of issues that aren't commonly known, so it will work for your story.
I'm aware of a couple of other ways to jigger this system. They're beyond the abilities of your characters. And neither is 100% sure-fire. They merely reduce the chances of random chance to a minimum. As far as I know there's no 100% way to avoid this database.
But let me point out that as a writer, you have an advantage. You can control random chance. Book getting a bit boring, introduce random chance. Need to get your character out of trouble, introduce random chance. But an author takes the systems that the police use, and find the weak points in them to exploit. But if the author comes up with a fool-proof scheme (never mind that in reality I don't think that exists), then there is no drama in the book. It's the bad guys exploiting the weaknesses in the system that make a book work.
Jim Clark-Dawe