We can't tolerate fake, expired, and obscured car tags

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We can't tolerate fake, expired, and obscured car tags

Matthew Yglesias

10 - 12 minutes

For a while now, some dad friends I’m in a group text with have been complaining obsessively about the poor state of traffic safety in D.C. We all have young kids, and we would like them to not be run down by cars.

Traffic safety is a multi-dimensional process, and many key factors — like the trend toward bigger vehicles — are outside the hands of city government. But the city can and does establish speed limits and other rules governing how you are allowed to drive. These rules are enforced through various means, but we increasingly rely on automated traffic enforcement via cameras, which seems very sensible. Automated enforcement is more cost-effective, less prone to racial bias, and less likely to lead to encounters that are dangerous for either drivers or officers. But automated enforcement relies on capturing cars’ license plates, so miscreants have increasingly taken to either installing tinted shields that block the cameras’ operation or else using fake paper temporary tags.

Fake tags are not new — here’s a 1998 article about them — but they have proliferated recently thanks to a nexus of factors.

One is that the rise in automated enforcement has created more incentive to use fake tags. The other is that Covid-era delays in DMV processing led to a lot of forbearance being extended for all kinds of things related to cars. The third is the broader trend toward a general cultural disparagement of enforcing rules. And last but by no means least, the fact that lots of people have been clearly getting away with this has encouraged others.

So inspired by a friend, I started photographing every example I could find of cars parked with fake/expired tags or license plate shields and reporting them to the city through our local 311 mobile app.

I also tweeted about my enforcement actions. This proved controversial, but I think there are a lot of us out there who do not think people should be driving around cities with fake or illegally obscured licensed plates, and I want everyone who’s upset about this to know that they aren’t the only ones. I would like to invite — encourage, even — everyone to join me in photographing and reporting license plate miscreants and talking about it publicly in hopes of encouraging others to report, encouraging elected officials to take the problem seriously, and encouraging motorists to fear detection.

Cars, as you have probably noticed, have license plates affixed to them. This is true in every state. And in Canada. And Mexico. And indeed every country that I’m familiar with, because it’s important to be able to identify cars.

The discussion with friends that led me to plate-spotting was about pedestrian safety and traffic laws. But obviously license plates can play an important role in dealing with violent crime. If there’s a drive-by shooting and you’re lucky, there will be witnesses or a nearby camera that caught an image of the license plate. And much more so than descriptions of people, being a little bit off-base can still be helpful. Like if you see a “red Honda sedan with Maryland plates that ended in number 7,” that actually narrows down the set of possible vehicles, even though the elements of the description are pretty vague.

License plates are also necessary for automatic traffic enforcement. But even with traditional police stops, a key thing is that when they pull you over to ticket you for speeding, they can run your plates to see if you have any other tickets outstanding. It’s handy.

To the best of my knowledge, most of the people driving around D.C. with bogus tags are just trying to drive recklessly with impunity, not kill anyone or commit carjackings. But the violent criminals swim like fish in a sea of reckless drivers. If almost nobody was driving around town with fake tags, you could be certain the handful of people who were doing it were up to no good and really crack down on them. The presumption that it’s a kind of “everyone’s doing it” fake crime makes it easy for people who are trying to cover their tracks while committing premeditated violent offenses.

By the same token, just because there are a lot of fake expired tags circulating doesn’t mean that everyone you see on the street with expired tags has deliberately acquired bogus ones. Lots of people are just a bit lazy or cheap or otherwise failing to comply with the rules without intending any malice. But, again, letting people get away with routinely driving around with temporary tags that expired months ago makes it easy to get away with fake tags. It would be great to live in a world of leniency and forbearance about expired tags, but you can’t do that in a world where there are lots of fake tags floating around. We need to be pretty aggressive about booting and towing cars that don’t have proper license plates.

A problem that is somewhat D.C.-specific but that speaks to broader cultural currents is that the D.C. government is currently owed roughly $500 million in unpaid tickets, mostly by Maryland and Virginia drivers.

The reason out-of-state drivers owe so much money is that Maryland and Virginia don’t have reciprocity for enforcing non-points violations, like illegal parking or speed camera infractions. The mayor has been trying to get a tri-jurisdiction deal together on this, but because suburbanites are much more likely to come into D.C. to park illegally than vice versa, they are refusing:

    On Wednesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser explained how she hopes to solve that problem.

    "Now it's time for all of us to sit at the table to have a regional enforcement campaign, and ticket payment is key to that," Bowser said.

    Every state offers reciprocity for minor moving violations issued by officers that carry points, but photo and parking tickets don’t carry points.

More forceful measures are needed. If an out-of-state car with multiple unpaid tickets is seen parked in the city, it ought to be swiftly booted. But the city currently has six workers to handle booting responsibilities, and there are 500,000 eligible vehicles.

That’s not great.

Especially not when enforcement of these rules could raise revenue. People who enjoy reckless driving often complain that all traffic enforcement is revenue-motivated. I don’t think that’s true, but I do agree that it would be improper — traffic fines should be set for safety reasons, not as a way to make money. But the fact that actually collecting the fines is revenue positive is a relevant policy consideration for how much we should invest in booting and towing. That’s important for the out-of-state speeders, but it’s especially important for the fake tags crew since police officers can’t count on being able to ticket the vehicle and then catch up with it later.

I was able to go on Facebook Marketplace, search for “temporary tags,” and find people selling fake tags.

Tinted license plate screens are openly sold on Amazon.

This is also not great.

License plates are designed to be high contrast so that they are easy to see. They should be readable by traffic cameras, yes, but the idea is to make it as easy as possible for anyone to read the license plate, maximizing the odds of an eyewitness in the case of malfeasance. There is no legitimate reason to obscure your license plate from public view. Amazon should not be selling tools for doing so, and Facebook should definitely not be selling fake tags.

There are some larger questions about how we should think about the trafficking of likely illegal goods on Facebook. But at a minimum, the FTC and other relevant authorities should be leaning on tech companies to crack down on this.

Amazon, at least, is a reasonably PR-sensitive company and the tinted-plate market can’t be all that valuable to the company. If enough people yell at them, they might just stop selling this category of product.

If you ask any savvy progressive traffic safety advocate, they’ll tell you that the real solution to pedestrian safety isn’t cameras, it’s better road design. When roads are of a reasonable width with narrow lanes, people generally drive slowly. On wide roads with wide lanes, they drive fast.

And I fully accept that analysis.

There is no substitute for sound urban design, and it’s good that in D.C., at least, we are slowly but steadily reshaping the city to reflect the needs of the people who live here rather than the needs of suburban commuters.

But no matter the street design, if people are driving recklessly fast or blowing through stop signs, that’s a problem. It’s also just not possible to have a functioning city without rules about which cars are allowed to park where and for how long and what they have to pay for the privilege. If we don’t enforce those rules, the system breaks down. And while enforcing those rules should not be a police responsibility at the first cut, standing behind any system is the idea that there is going to be some policing. Automated traffic enforcement is great, but only if people have legitimate tags on their cars. Me spotting fake tags on the street is fun — and you should get in on the fun — but the best solution would be for police officers to spot the tags, too.

This is also a whole category of crimes that cuts against the notion that we could solve everything with social services.

There’s an undeniable relationship between lack of economic opportunity and people’s inclination to get caught up in certain illicit activities. But people who are speeding and parking illegally aren’t all out there doing it because of poverty, and they’re not going to stop if you provide them with affordable housing. I see illicit tags on German luxury cars all the time. I think everyone kind of knows this “all crime is about poverty” line isn’t really true — very rich people do crimes for personal financial gain all the time — but there’s a kind of cognitive dissonance around the reality that, yeah, rules need enforcement.

Meanwhile, a lot of people on the right seem to have negative-polarized themselves against pedestrians and urbanism to the extent that they don’t think it’s legitimate to enforce traffic laws. Well, that’s also dumb. And plenty of people get killed by reckless driving while driving their cars. People just shouldn’t be allowed to speed. And they shouldn’t be allowed to drive around with fake, obscured, or expired tags. And if you see people doing it, you should say something.