From Slate, another Sailer-inspired piece on the rise in car crashes.
Why More Americans Are Using Fake License Plates and Getting Away With It
The old system of traffic control is breaking down.
BY HENRY GRABAR
APRIL 25, 20231:15 PM… It’s a problem from Manhattan to the Rio Grande, as cheap paper license plates proliferate on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. The rise in camera-generated tolling and ticketing and a pullback in traffic policing have combined to create some very strong incentives to opt out of America’s century-old system of traffic control.
This fraud unfolds against the backdrop of a roadway safety crisis. More pedestrians are being killed than at any point in the past 40 years; for motorists, the per-mile fatality rate has gone up more than 20 percent just since 2019. This has happened while our peer nations have all made enormous strides in reducing roadway deaths
Competent countries like Finland have installed a lot of road cameras, and then mail speeding tickets out to violators. They don’t need to have cops pulling over people. On the other hand, Finland is full of Finns.
; the U.S. is going in the opposite direction. It’s hard to say if there’s a strong correlation between fake license plates and bad driving
Yes.
, though the former clearly abets the latter.
Most of the time, these discouraging trends get chalked up to infrastructure and automobile design, and with good reason. But the U.S. has also recently started to reevaluate its approach to automobile policing. After a century in which cars served as a one-way ratchet for police power, revising our understanding of the Fourth Amendment and serving as Americans’ leading source of interactions with police, many jurisdictions have stepped back traffic enforcement through some combination of civil rights concerns and police work stoppages.
Consider San Francisco: In 2019 the San Francisco Police Department wrote 27,029 traffic citations, or about 74 a day. In the first five months of 2022, the department was averaging 10 a day. …
Meanwhile in Philadelphia, traffic stops fell from 330,000 a year in the late 2010s to 150,000 in 2020 and 2021, a steeper decline than can be explained by reduced traffic counts in the COVID era. (The city recorded more than 150 traffic deaths in 2020, a 10-year high.)
Which brings us back to the fake license plates. Their popularity seems to jibe with this new, live-free-or-die status quo on the road, a cynical exploitation of a unique moment in policing. The left has soured on traffic stops, recognizing their discriminatory qualities and tendency to lead to tragic police-citizen interactions. The right has blocked automated traffic policing in many statehouses, because freedom. The police are wary of both cameras and enforcement.
The practice of pretextual traffic stops is a bad one—a discriminatory practice that drowns its victims in debt, it has produced a number of high-profile tragedies, such as the killings of Philando Castile and Patrick Lyoya.
Nah, it’s probably the most effective gun control method there is: “Sir, it says here there’s a warrant out for your arrest for beating up your ex-girlfriend. And, oh, look, there’s a Glock partly hidden under your seat.”
… That’s why many jurisdictions have decided to do away with traffic stops for low-level offenses. In Philadelphia, for example, after the aforementioned drop in citations, the city decided to phase out police enforcement of minor traffic violations, including dubious pretexts like “rearview mirror decorations.” Los Angeles has done something similar.
It’s too soon to say whether less traffic policing—whether it comes from police pullback or civil rights directives—is related to bad driving. But it taps into a larger question: How do you keep order on the road without the cycle of fines and penalties associated with traffic policing? The question, as with most things in American cities, has a racial dimension. First, because minorities have typically been the victims of discriminatory traffic policing. Second, because of the complicated, racially coded perception of what constitutes uncivil behavior on the road, and what to do about it.
Everything in America eventually turns into an issue of race.
Mathew Yglesias is on a crusade to snitch on all the fake license plates in his neighborhood. Everybody gets mad at him over this, but he’s actually being a public-spirited citizen. Legitimate license plates are essential to a functioning automotive society.
Let’s talk about fake license plates. It seems like they can be defeated, but it’s a lot of work:
April is my first of three fundraisers per year. I’m a full-time professional writer, which is what lets me do what I do. But what I do doesn’t pay that well. For example, in June I’m doing my first paid speech in a decade. Leftist violence and cancellations by hotels afraid of leftist violence has kept me from public speaking. So, I rely on the generosity of my readers to let me keep going rather than getting a real job.
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