I live in Ohio. Recently, the police in a nearby small town were accused of racial profiling. My understanding is that they pulled people over because they (the police) “ran the plates” on the car (which they do at random, so they say) and thus discovered that the driver did not have a valid driver’s license. In the instance that triggered the racial profiling accusation, the (brown, foreign-looking) driver they pulled over had a valid driver’s license, and when he offered it to the police, they backed down.
I have a car registered in my name. I also have a driver’s license. If those things are associated, my car could be stolen, but until it is reported as stolen, the police could “run my plates” and think all is well, because my driver’s license is valid.
Is there any system in which a car registration is associated with a driver’s license?
I would be surprised if most systems didn’t make such a simple link. Cars are registered in someone’s name, and people tend to have driver’s licenses. In most places the authority that manages the car registrations is the same as the the one that manages driver’s licenses. Bingo.
Here, where I live, my car registration has a “customer number” as part of the registration. This can be a range of things. For corporate cars it can be the owning corporation. But for ordinary people, their customer number is the same as their driver’s license number.
In general, governments like to link the two anyway. It tells them where to send the fines, and if the offense is bad enough, where to go to find the owner and presumed driver.
In general, if the police see a car on the road they will always assume that “all is well”. Random running the plates is a good thing to do, as it randomly turns up stuff. But you can hardly expect the police to be prescient. Until you report the car as stolen, exactly how do you expect the police to know?
Well, first of all, it seems that if those two things weren’t associated, the same thing you describe would happen also.
However, I assume that if running your plates pulls up your driver’s license number, it will also pull up the associated photo, height, weight, hair color, etc. If the driver of your (hypothetically stolen) car were clearly not you (not necessarily suspicious in itself), but also driving erratically, blowing clouds of ganja smoke, making a sudden U-turn and zooming away, or something like that, they might decide to pull them over where they may not have otherwise.
FTR, I personally am against most of this “convenient” pooling of computerized data across all former boundaries. I think data mining is invasive, unethical, and really really annoying.
You can’t have a direct link – one person might own two cars. Or two people might drive the same car. The two people might be a married couple, with the wife keeping her maiden name. Or you could be lending the car to a friend or relative. If the car is owned by a company, the driver could just be a random employee.
The case in the OP shows the danger. A car may be registered to Joe Smith. A search shows Joe Smith at the same address has an expired license. But the address is a large apartment building with two people named “Joe Smith.”
You certainly can look up a driver’s info based upon knowing his name from the registration, but you have to be very careful what conclusions you draw from that.
In New York, at least, there is no information that links the two numbers, probably because a connection is too flaky to be useful.
I suspect that is why they use “customer number” here. That is an explicit and unique link. No name or address is involved. The law here requires that the car be registered in one name. They are very clear about the fact that registration and ownership are different things. Registration of a car is not proof of ownership or title. So you can have a jointly owned car, but someone, or a body corporate must take responsibility for it. That entity is what is referenced by the customer number.
It isn’t as if the dangers of non-unique identification is something new or unknown. A licence authority that didn’t have their head around such a trivial issue is simply incompetent.
We’re over thinking this one. The cop sees someone in the car who’s guilty of a DWB (driving While Black), and then runs the plates looking for any infraction. If none are found, he’ll pull the car over looking for problems (insurance not up to date, driver license not valid, seatbelt not on, etc.).
In other words, they see a foreign looking guy, then run the plates looking for infractions. What they probably found was that this car was associated with a previous infraction where the driver (who might not have been the same driver) didn’t have a valid drivers license, so they pulled the car over to try to get the driver again.
In MA when the police type in a license plate number it automatically brings up drivers licenses listed on that vehicles insurance.
I once had a confrontation with an officer over this issue. My license was temporally suspended. I was living with a friend of mine her business(gaming shop) was across the street and had parking associated with it. My car was parked in one of those spots. The officer came into the shop asking for me by name and accused me of driving without a license. My response being ‘I’m not driving’. He somehow could not make the connection that my car which was registered and insured could not have been parked there by a licensed driver. I was pretty upset with the police running my plates harassing me in from of the stores customers.
I am also in Mass. It is common for police to ‘run the plates’ on any car they think is suspicious. They will usually tailgate you at a distance that would get anyone else a severe penalty for about 5 minutes or so, if everything comes up clear then they turn off or pull you over for some BS reason depending on their mood. I often wonder what would happen if I where to slam on the brakes while they were doing this, there is no way they could stop.
I work a night shift so the hours I am on the road automatically makes me ‘suspicious’ and if you drive a crappy car it’s ten times worse. I am white BTW.