It used to be that each state had a single color scheme for its license plates, with the name of the state prominently visible. The color combinations and fonts were pretty recognizable to anyone who did much driving. Now, states have a variety of commemorative, decorative, and special interest license plates. My state alone, Virginia, has dozens of them. It is not always easy to read the state name, and often the state name is obscured when the driver has installed a license plate frame (or worse, shaded plastic cover when you can’t read the plate at all, or even worse worse, covers that are specifically designed to obscure the plate).
How do police make IDs based on car license plates today, either for cars that the police see themselves, or a witness report that says “the license number is XYZ-123 but I have no idea what state it was.”
Yes, those systems are becoming more common. But experienced cops are going to recognize on sight most states’ plates that they commonly see. Any they’re unsure of, they can get near enough to look more closely. Any that they still can’t recognize - if, for instance, the state name is obscured by the license plate frame - they can cite the driver for having an obstructed license plate (up to a $150 fine in my Ohio city).
They could also try the novel technique of putting the plate numbers into the big database in the sky without specifying a state and seeing which 5 states come back as having issued that particular combo. And what vehicles they each go with.
Odds are only 1 or at most 2 of the five is going to be a late model gray Camry like the witness reported.
In our area the toll roads and congestion toll lanes have scanners to read plates for toll collection as well. There are enough tourists here driving in from out of state and enough out of state rental cars on our roads that it’s implausible the Florida toll authority just gives them a freebie.
IOW, the OP’s concern is evidently a well-solved problem.
Not much help here in Arizona where there are 50-some specialty plates available. Some, like the Alternate Fuel or Historic Vehicle plates are just for vehicles that are different from the mainstream in some way. Some, like the Arizona Cardinals or the Collegiate - Arizona State University plates are to “show your support” for an entity. Some, like the Boy Scouts of Arizona or Channel 8 PBS actually get a chunk of the specialty plate fee and the renewal fee every year.
There are in addition some plates that are not shown, like a dealer’s plate that can be switched from vehicle to vehicle, and other specialty plates no longer offered. TPTB in Arizona solved the problem by passing a law forbidding frames that obscure the “Arizona” at the top of the plate. This means most of the fancy plate frames you can buy are illegal to install here in the state.
I can run the plate through every state and Canada at the same time on the data terminal in my squad. But that doesn’t help much when 15 states pop up with plates that are identically numbered. I still would have to go through every hit to determine which plate goes to the vehicle I’m watching. And it only works if the correct plate is on that vehicle to begin with.
The answer to the OP is, it’s a pain in the ass. It would be nice if every state had 1 or 2 distinct plates like they used to. Now there are hundreds of plates.
And it’s not just LEO’s it affects. Witnesses to incidents involving vehicles can give a partial plate # and plate style description, but it could match dozens of plate designs from dozens of states.
I know of no agencies around here that have installed those on squads.
I figured that the reason most regularly-issued state license plates were white with maybe minimal dashes of color in the design, was because some genius decided that law enforcement officers/license plate readers were only capable of deciphering pale plates with dark letters and numbers.
Thus we have uniformly boring and hard to distinguish state plates.
Pkbites, I’ve wondered about the legality of those plate covers like the one in the OP’s link. They’re designed to prevent the license plate from being viewed properly, especially by a camera, so doesn’t that violate the law requiring display of a plate?
If the law says “you must display item A” and you intentionally obstruct viewing of item A, how is that legal?
What do police think of them and can you/do you charge people with violating the law?
That, itself, was a new trend at one point. I recall there being some study suggesting that the reflective white plates were more easily read. Before then, states issued plates in various distinctive color schemes, as noted above. In the days when most states sent you new plates regularly, they changed the color scheme to make expired plates obvious, rather than issuing you the little sticker every year. And everybody had a big stack of old plates in various colors to decorate their walls with.
The switch to white plates happened about in the 80s I think. When I moved from Colorado to California in 1984, most CA cars were gold on blue - a quick check shows they went to the white plates in 1982.
FWIW, our county sheriff’s dept, which also provides services for about half the municipalities in the county, doesn’t have plate scanners on the ordinary LEO squads.
But does have them on every parking enforcement vehicle. Which people and vehicles are a subdivision of the sheriff’s department.
I suspect they’ll be standard issue on all our regular LEO vehicles soon enough.
California over the years had black on gold, gold on black, gold on blue, and blue on white. For the most part, the state has avoided the difficult to read license plate trend.
My current state, South Carolina, just recently switched from a very pleasing looking, but hard to decipher scheme (dark blue on a rosy/peach background) to a very easy to decipher scheme (blue on white). It was done specifically to help LEOs read the plates. Of course, there are still a gazillion vanity plate styles you can buy, because God help us if we give up the minimal revenue that brings in each year.
Many states use a special set of designating letters in the vanity plates. Thus, for example, plates that proclaim the driver is a veteran might start with VE_________.
I vaguely remember those days. Every year you’d end up physically installing new plates with a completely different license number. It was an incredibly wasteful stupid system that almost every jurisdiction used. Typically I think many states and provinces would just reverse their standard colors from one year to the next.