Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/08/kentucky-driver-busted-for-han.html
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The individual’s out-of-state driver’s license raised a few suspicions too.
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In Texas, temporary tags are printed on plain white stock by dealers, and I’m pretty sure there’s an underground trade in selling fake ones–printing a fake wouldn’t be hard. Seems like it would be easy money for cops to pull over anyone with a temporary tag that looks like it’s been on the vehicle a little too long.
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New Jersey does this, too. I feel like I’ve seen it elsewhere, as well. In New York you cant even park on a public road way without getting a ticket and tow.
Steve Jobs famously used a weird loophole in California law to never even bother with a license plate. He’d basically just get a brand new car every few months and replace it when the grace period was up.
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Guy I knew in college drove around CT for an entire semester with a cardboard plate that said “LSD-25” and never got busted.
Of course it was marked as a Pennsylvania plate, so maybe the Connecticut cops thought that’s just how they looked.
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i find it amazing that someone went to all this trouble and then forgot registration sticker. FOCUS, MAN.
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That’s not a whole lot better than the fake IDs that were for sale in a basement shop in Boston in the early '90s. My school took a yearly trip there for the Harvard Model Congress. The previous year’s attendees had told us about the place. It was a trip. The IDs said, in both English and Spanish, on the back that they were not valid IDs. They had books where you could look up the zip code for any location in the US. And they had a deal where, for $30, you got 2 IDs and a (laminated) Social Security card. They were really crappy, but still mostly worked back home. Word got around to the local alcohol stores after our star quarterback, whose face when in the paper weekly, was busted using his ID, but by that time many of us were known regulars who weren’t carded anymore.
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I came here to see a reply complaining about the KERNING.
I leave disappointed.
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I called this the “Ashley ______ Law.” Someone I worked with never put on her plates so she could drive in the toll road.
It was three years before she was caught without plates, and even then the police gave her a fix it ticket (she played dumb and it worked).
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Back in the early 90s, I was stopped by an insolent porker for an expired tag. Porker was the nephew of the head honcho at my employer, and I recently had been told by a part-time male employee that he was paid better than the full-time female department employees.
I asked porker why he didn’t enforce equal pay for equal work laws since Tennessee has an equal rights law. He responded that it wasn’t his job. It was raining, I was working sick and my last money had gone for a prescription. I decided to keep him out in the rain and argue the point in hope of arousing whatever vestigial conscience a hawg might possess.
No luck. He ticketed me and told me to have the tag within 48 hours. I wrote a check for the tag, it bounced, and I was hospitalized with status asthmaticus and a flaming respiratory infection within 96 hours.
After my release, the tag office sent a man to repossess the tag. I acquired an expired tag at a junkyard, bought more at garage sales, made my own stickers, and went without the blasted thing for about six years, occasionally getting caught and refusing to pay fines.
A relative finally bribed me with a better used car, conditional upon getting it all cleared up. I finally ran a one-woman labor protest against the employer, who later was fined a cool five million for fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid billing.
Happy ending is that the African-American guy who had the unequal pay ended up on scholarship to an Ivy League university and is now a human resources representative, bending the arc of justice for us all.
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Honestly, a lot of people did this, and it didn’t require buying a new car. If you had the temporary registration stuck to the corner of your windshield and the promotional plastic from the dealer where the plates go, cops wouldn’t look twice at you. An acquaintance of mine did that for ten years with his car. The temp paper was so faded you couldn’t read it anymore. Obviously if you get pulled over for something else it’ll be a problem, but they never pull people over for that as far as I saw. Thousands and thousands of people did this, in fact. You saw a lot of cars around with no plates that didn’t look very new.
Another fun game- start looking at the stickers. Probably 20% of the ones I look at in CA are expired. There are huge numbers of unregistered cars driving around. I think the bottom line is it just isn’t a big priority for them to enforce. Perhaps because the ratio of CHP to drivers is very very low. Nowhere close to enough manpower to enforce all the little stuff.
Now they do the paper tags like Texas, and I’m sure people are faking those too.
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That’s insane to me. In New York the inspection stickers are color coded to the year and the registration sticker has the expiration year in giant numbers. Any cop with decent vision can see them clearly and are aggressive about busting people. I’ve been pulled over for being a few days out of tolerance and ticketed just for parking on a public road.
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Yah it was insane for me too when I first moved here. I came from a place where every dent on your car had to be marked with a government sticker or you would get cited for an unreported accident. And speeding or expired plates? Forget it- you’ll get caught instantly. In CA people just… don’t register their cars… and speed limits are set only by traffic (which is generally substantial and thus self-regulates fairly well).
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I’m guessing most of them were white.
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Sorry, I should have clarified- absolutely 100% white, yes. Nobody of color was getting away with any of the aforementioned minor infractions for long. 
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No worries. I wasn’t criticizing your comment. It was interesting. I just thought it worth noting in general.
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Yeesh. That sounds a bit draconian.
Yeah, I noticed that. A nice, leisurely 5 mph. 
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