4 ms·

If you cover everywhere in license plate readers, the bad guys will just carry fake plates in their pockets... It takes what - 30 seconds - to tape a new plate

If you cover everywhere in license plate readers, the bad guys will just carry fake plates in their pockets... It takes what - 30 seconds - to tape a new plate over the old one...

ethagknight 3y ago
Tape over the lettering, even easier
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  Ideally you want a plate that is not yours, but that won't get you pulled over for not having a plate.
  - adolph 3y ago
    Do people really get pulled over for no plate? Steve Jobs was characteristically coy when he told biographer Walter Isaacson why he felt no need to have a license plate on his Mercedes. Jobs brushed off the question as if he were invincible, but it turns out he was just exploiting a loophole in California's vehicle laws. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/how-steve-jobs-got-away-not-having-license-plate/336221/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/how-s...
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      Steve Jobs used dealership plates. If you have a metal plate with tape over the numbers, there is a 100% chance that you're breaking the law.
beretguy 3y ago
Or install hideaway license plates
ben_w 3y ago
https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/ comes to mind. https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/vehicle-registration-license-plate-or-sticker-fraud-california-vehicle-code-4463/#:~:text=If%20you%20find%20yourself%20contemplating,stickers%20pursuant%20to%20Section%204853 https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/vehicle-registration-li....
mc32 3y ago
Yeah, but that's for the premeditated stuff, not for opportunistic stuff. A lot of crime is opportunistic and law enforcement will have a better time following up on those.
- bonton89 3y ago
  If they even bother to follow up. Around here a lot of people don't even bother reporting small thefts since they know nothing will come of it, usually the only reason you bother is to get a police report for the insurance claim. Aren't like 50% of rape kits not even processed?
- Covzire 3y ago
  Some people aren't aware it's de-facto legal to go into a SF store and steal $949 worth of stuff and leave and there's nothing anyone will do. Shop owners who call the police will get in trouble themselves. Unbelievable that it got to this in the first place but that's a political mono-culture for you, they get to try wild and different policies without push back hoping for positive counterintuitive results that somehow lessens crime and improves equity but all they're doing is creating food deserts as business flees.
  - mc32 3y ago
    It is sad. A minority of people in SF had been saying for years that the situation was getting out of hand -but the other side would scoff and accuse critics of being of all things Republicans, not progressive, anti-whatever they could come up with. Willie Brown may have been corrupt, but SF would never have spiraled like it did under his leadership. Towards the end of Newsom's tenure we saw cracks --there was always the homeless who no matter what they did, it was never their fault, the drug addicted kids in the Haight too. I remember having cops investigate if I was stopped on the wrong side of the street (parked facing the wrong way), or I was stopped in an area too long. It was annoying, sure. But it kept crime down. It took many years to get to the nadir, and it will take years to recover as well.
  - BobaFloutist 3y ago
    This is misinformation. CA raised the threshold for felony grand theft from $400 (which is what it had been since 1982) to $950. $950 is still lower than 1. The threshold as it was originally set, corrected for inflation 2. The threshold in 40 other states and for the federal government. It is not legal to steal up to $949 dollars of goods from a store, it's still a misdemeanor which is, despite the name, a pretty serious crime. It's just not a felony. Police love to use it as an excuse not to do their jobs though, so the misinformation has thrived and spread among those who have strong feelings about criminal justice reform.
boringg 3y ago
True. Commenter made the point that for opportunistic crime they will be able to find you and track you down which is probably a lions share. Also - I bet they could run a quick query matching license plates to state databases to find illegal cars in near real time. Cost a decent amount of change and some privacy issues but that would be a simple step after having the images in the cloud.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Ya. People without plates or stolen plates are a huge problem where I live. Cracking down just on that would be useful to making things safer.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    Or paper tags (thank you, Texas!). Texas finally passed some legislation to get rid of the tags recently and force real ones, but that is going to take some time to implement (2 years) For those that weren’t aware, Texas has had such a massive problem with its paper tags in how easy they are to fraudulently produce that criminals in all 50 states use them: https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/how-texas-paper-tags-became-a-200m-criminal-enterprise-nbc-5-investigates/2808043/?amp=1 https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/how-texas-paper-tags-b... It’s actually a decently cool story because it was directly the result of a newspapers (the Statesman) reporting about the problem that led to the investigation, prosecution of criminals and legislation that’s fixing it. A great reminder of how important actual journalism is
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Washington now requires laminated paper temp plates that are displayed outside before the real plates can arrive.
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
        Texas’ problem was not really the fact that you can print them easily, but the fact that you could produce “legitimate” ones without any verification whatsoever that the car actually existed. The DPS also had some limitations in what they could do enforce anything for several years which made the problem worse (legislative red tape). So all these tags were actual legitimate tags that showed up in a legit tag database, they just never were real cars that corresponded to sales. So even something like a license plate reader wouldn’t have caught these. Although I will say anything that a layman producing with a printer that has value is always going to have a counterfeit risk. It just wasn’t counterfeit in the typical sense here.
mlinhares 3y ago
One thing Gersh Kuntzman found out on his criminal mischief operation was that cops did do this a lot, so the really bad offenders won't be picked up because they're part of the system itself that polices such things. Some of the cases were really in your face, with people using full plate covers with the car parked in front of a police station. If you don't know who Gersh is check out: https://www.curbed.com/2023/12/congestion-pricing-gersh-kuntzman-toll-evasion-license-plates.html https://www.curbed.com/2023/12/congestion-pricing-gersh-kunt...
lazycog512 3y ago
Not only do they have fake plates, they have stolen plates that match the cars they are in, so it's nearly impossible to determine the car being spotted does not match the car on the plates without actually stopping it.
battery_glasses 3y ago
Should we stop trying to enforce laws because people try to evade enforcement?
- beaeglebeached 3y ago
  Yes. Anarcho tyranny that selectively enforces more against the more innocent is worse than anarchy.
mint2 3y ago
They already do it as it is, they various thieves either use a stolen car or stolen plates.

If you cover everywhere in license plate readers, the bad guys will just carry fake plates in their pockets... It takes what - 30 seconds - to tape a new plate over the old one...

ethagknight 3y ago

Tape over the lettering, even easier

thaumasiotes 3y ago
Ideally you want a plate that is not yours, but that won't get you pulled over for not having a plate.
- adolph 3y ago
  Do people really get pulled over for no plate? Steve Jobs was characteristically coy when he told biographer Walter Isaacson why he felt no need to have a license plate on his Mercedes. Jobs brushed off the question as if he were invincible, but it turns out he was just exploiting a loophole in California's vehicle laws. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/how-steve-jobs-got-away-not-having-license-plate/336221/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/how-s...
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Steve Jobs used dealership plates. If you have a metal plate with tape over the numbers, there is a 100% chance that you're breaking the law.

beretguy 3y ago

Or install hideaway license plates

ben_w 3y ago

https://xkcd.com/1494/ https://xkcd.com/1494/ comes to mind. https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/vehicle-registration-license-plate-or-sticker-fraud-california-vehicle-code-4463/#:~:text=If%20you%20find%20yourself%20contemplating,stickers%20pursuant%20to%20Section%204853 https://www.wklaw.com/practice-areas/vehicle-registration-li....

mc32 3y ago

Yeah, but that's for the premeditated stuff, not for opportunistic stuff. A lot of crime is opportunistic and law enforcement will have a better time following up on those.

bonton89 3y ago
If they even bother to follow up. Around here a lot of people don't even bother reporting small thefts since they know nothing will come of it, usually the only reason you bother is to get a police report for the insurance claim. Aren't like 50% of rape kits not even processed?
Covzire 3y ago
Some people aren't aware it's de-facto legal to go into a SF store and steal $949 worth of stuff and leave and there's nothing anyone will do. Shop owners who call the police will get in trouble themselves. Unbelievable that it got to this in the first place but that's a political mono-culture for you, they get to try wild and different policies without push back hoping for positive counterintuitive results that somehow lessens crime and improves equity but all they're doing is creating food deserts as business flees.
- mc32 3y ago
  It is sad. A minority of people in SF had been saying for years that the situation was getting out of hand -but the other side would scoff and accuse critics of being of all things Republicans, not progressive, anti-whatever they could come up with. Willie Brown may have been corrupt, but SF would never have spiraled like it did under his leadership. Towards the end of Newsom's tenure we saw cracks --there was always the homeless who no matter what they did, it was never their fault, the drug addicted kids in the Haight too. I remember having cops investigate if I was stopped on the wrong side of the street (parked facing the wrong way), or I was stopped in an area too long. It was annoying, sure. But it kept crime down. It took many years to get to the nadir, and it will take years to recover as well.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  This is misinformation. CA raised the threshold for felony grand theft from $400 (which is what it had been since 1982) to $950. $950 is still lower than 1. The threshold as it was originally set, corrected for inflation 2. The threshold in 40 other states and for the federal government. It is not legal to steal up to $949 dollars of goods from a store, it's still a misdemeanor which is, despite the name, a pretty serious crime. It's just not a felony. Police love to use it as an excuse not to do their jobs though, so the misinformation has thrived and spread among those who have strong feelings about criminal justice reform.

boringg 3y ago

True. Commenter made the point that for opportunistic crime they will be able to find you and track you down which is probably a lions share. Also - I bet they could run a quick query matching license plates to state databases to find illegal cars in near real time. Cost a decent amount of change and some privacy issues but that would be a simple step after having the images in the cloud.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Ya. People without plates or stolen plates are a huge problem where I live. Cracking down just on that would be useful to making things safer.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  Or paper tags (thank you, Texas!). Texas finally passed some legislation to get rid of the tags recently and force real ones, but that is going to take some time to implement (2 years) For those that weren’t aware, Texas has had such a massive problem with its paper tags in how easy they are to fraudulently produce that criminals in all 50 states use them: https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/how-texas-paper-tags-became-a-200m-criminal-enterprise-nbc-5-investigates/2808043/?amp=1 https://www.nbcdfw.com/investigations/how-texas-paper-tags-b... It’s actually a decently cool story because it was directly the result of a newspapers (the Statesman) reporting about the problem that led to the investigation, prosecution of criminals and legislation that’s fixing it. A great reminder of how important actual journalism is
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Washington now requires laminated paper temp plates that are displayed outside before the real plates can arrive.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
      Texas’ problem was not really the fact that you can print them easily, but the fact that you could produce “legitimate” ones without any verification whatsoever that the car actually existed. The DPS also had some limitations in what they could do enforce anything for several years which made the problem worse (legislative red tape). So all these tags were actual legitimate tags that showed up in a legit tag database, they just never were real cars that corresponded to sales. So even something like a license plate reader wouldn’t have caught these. Although I will say anything that a layman producing with a printer that has value is always going to have a counterfeit risk. It just wasn’t counterfeit in the typical sense here.

mlinhares 3y ago

One thing Gersh Kuntzman found out on his criminal mischief operation was that cops did do this a lot, so the really bad offenders won't be picked up because they're part of the system itself that polices such things. Some of the cases were really in your face, with people using full plate covers with the car parked in front of a police station. If you don't know who Gersh is check out: https://www.curbed.com/2023/12/congestion-pricing-gersh-kuntzman-toll-evasion-license-plates.html https://www.curbed.com/2023/12/congestion-pricing-gersh-kunt...

lazycog512 3y ago

Not only do they have fake plates, they have stolen plates that match the cars they are in, so it's nearly impossible to determine the car being spotted does not match the car on the plates without actually stopping it.

battery_glasses 3y ago

Should we stop trying to enforce laws because people try to evade enforcement?

beaeglebeached 3y ago
Yes. Anarcho tyranny that selectively enforces more against the more innocent is worse than anarchy.

mint2 3y ago

They already do it as it is, they various thieves either use a stolen car or stolen plates.