DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour  

Other than the times I’m in a vehicle stopped on the shoulder of a road with both my hands on the steering wheel pleading my case, I’ve always held great respect for all police department personnel. I recently wrote a rant about people whose windows are so heavily tinted that an approaching policeman (or anyone else for that matter) can’t see inside — causing the police officer to fear for his safety. As I was driving on the freeway this morning I saw another infraction that seems the driver is thumbing his (or her) nose at law enforcement — license plates whose information is partially — or completely obliterated.

Sometimes this blockage comes at the hands of a large license plate bracket promoting some dealer. Others sometimes contain funny slogans while still others tell you what a great friend you have in Heaven. Whether it’s Bud Sykes Suzuki-Bentley dealership; a bracket telling you that “A Careless Driver is a Smashing Success” or another touting the Religious Institute of Rhode Island, covering any part of a license plate’s information is technically against the law in all 50 states. Of course…so is failure to use turn signals.

There are several solutions to this dilemma. The most obvious one would be to disallow license plate brackets entirely. I’m sure this would not be acceptable to the International Association of License Plate Bracket Manufacturers and they no doubt would mobilize their lobbyists for a full-court press in each of the 50 states and the State Houses of all our possessions and territories. Guam will probably be lobbied into changing their motto from “Where America’s Day Begins” to include “Where America’s Day Begins…and our non-reflective license plate brackets can be read. This battle will ultimately find its way to the Supreme Court as a censorship case so that outcome is iffy at best.

Another solution is to have states’ names imbedded in the background behind the numbers. Short of covering the entire plate this would at least allow easy definition of what state the vehicle is registered in. It would be pretty, too.

 A final, yet admittedly drastic solution would be this: should a vehicle be entering the freeway after fleeing the scene of a crime, even though there were eyewitnesses, they may only be able to give a general description of the car – even though they may have been two feet from the fleeing vehicle’s license plate. In that case the police should have the option of putting nail strips over a five-mile stretch of the interstate. Even though hundreds, if not thousands of vehicles would be forced to stop because of having flat tires, chances are the perpetrator’s vehicle would also be immobilized as well.

Granted, some vehicle that were traveling at an extremely high rate of speed may have flipped over, killing the occupants…but this is a war on crime…and war is fraught with collateral damage.  (There’s actually a hidden benefit for the driver; because of the nature of the police chase he won’t be issued an expensive speeding ticket he no doubt would have received had conditions been normal. Carried one step further, the driver’s insurance rates would have gone sky high because of a double-pointed speeding ticket. The good news is, it’s against the law in 37 states that you can’t raise prices on a dead man.

If you think the above scenario is beyond cruelty, how about this solution, Mother Theresa? If police stop a vehicle because the license plate’s state of issue…or even some numbers are obliterated, the policeman has the right to impound the vehicle until the errant driver pays his (or her) fine…and then give the vehicle to the nearest Demolition Derby race track, with the name of the former owner placed prominently along the side of the vehicle in Day-Glo florescent pink.

Bottom line of all this is the following: work with local authorities to obey the law because with your luck you could be walking home after losing your car and you get clobbered by your own vehicle. But you can’t be 100% sure it’s your own vehicle…BECAUSE YOU CAN’T TELL WHERE IT’S FROM!!!