Are they really allowed to take your license plate like that? Wow! He just sounds like a jerk to me.
I’ve been pulled over a few times for expired registration. Twice the car was registered, but I forgot the tags. Once I had sent the registration in, but hadn’t smogged my car, and once I had forgotton the actually register the car. I never paid a fine. Just a fix-it ticket and a processing fee ($10-$20, I think). I had an officer tell me that if your car is a year past registration, they can arrest you on the spot, but other than that, it’s just a fix-it ticket.
Yeah, unless you live in an area where the prevailing police attitude is, “Oh look! An out-of-state vehicle! If I give this person a speeding ticket, they’ll just have to pay it, because they live too far away to contest it! Free money for the state, no extra effort! Woohoo!”
The cop was wrong. Your car should have been towed. He gave you a break by letting you park it in a lot.
Last year, i was pulled over for an expired registration. It was less than a week expired. I only had the car for a couple months and i thought the registration renewed when i switched cars, but it renews every two years, whether you switch cars or not. The cops seemed nice , but they said it had to be towed because they already called in the plate number to the dispatcher. They gave me a ride the rest of the way to work (about 2 miles) and they didn’t give me a ticket, which is good because every ticket you get costs you about $500 over the years in insurance surcharges.
The only thing i didn’t like which they did, and which they constantly do to people who are out driving at 2 am (which is when i go to work), is they get behind you while driving and run your plate number to dispatch to “check you out”. It’s unnerving when a cop is following you, especially when they get up real close so that they can read your plate. Sometimes they just pull you over anyway, and lie about how fast you were going. They usually won’t give you a ticket because they know they’re full of shit and just want to see what you’re doing.
I take a different back-roads route to work now because i’m sick of getting harassed by cops all the time.
Plus if there’s a cop who’s just fishing for violations on any given car - if they run the plate and see that it’s not registered to that particular car, that’s a whole lot of trouble to stir up.
I’m sorry. I wasn’t serious. It just reminded me of when I moved to Massachusetts at the spur of the moment driving a partially wrecked truck with expired everything. I didn’t ever get into any trouble for it and people said that it was because they just didn’t want to deal with Louisiana plates and registration that they weren’t familiar with. I thought of them as my magic plates whether it was true or not.
No. He was just doing his job. He actually could have made things harder:
True. But towing a vehicle takes too much time & paperwork. Easier to let it sit somewhere for a while, then tow it later if the owner doesn’t come back.
When I moved back to MA from VA I still had VA plates. They expired and I couldn’t get VA to send me the sticker and new registration to an MA address. I spent about a year driving around in MA with expired VA plates. I didn’t get pulled over once.
In MA when I got pulled over for expired registration/no insurance. The officer took the plates and had the car impounded. I had to get the car insured and registered Then go to that police station to get my plate back. By the time I had those things resolved my car was in impound for a week. It was a very costly experiance.
This reminds me of when I drove back up north across the Triboro and made a mistake and got in an E-Z Pass lane by accident. Yes, I know I messed up. But do I have to sit through the cop saying
Where’s your E-Z Pass?
Where’s your <other autopay option sticker>?
Where’s your <third option for autopay sticker>?
My regsitration was like 8 days overdue, and I got pulled over. The cop was very nice. I told him I had just come back from California, and I was waiting to get paid because I didn’t have the $50 to get the registration (both of which were true). I told him I was planning on going to the DMV within the next couple of days…
He wrote me a ticket but told me to show up to court with my registration and it will be dropped. He let me drive away and told me that if anyone else pulls me over to just show them the ticket he wrote me.
The cop in the OP didn’t have to be such an asshole. The cop in my situation was very nice - although he technically didn’t have to be. But overall I think it’s more benficial to everyone (the driver, the cop, society in general) for a cop to be merciful and understanding. Expired registration is not a dangerous crime… why must drivers like th OP be treated as if they are dangerous criminals?
Registration is expensive! I am sure there are many many people in the US for whom a loss of $50 could mean no groceries for a week. But the loss of the car could mean not getting to work, which means no money at all. In my case, I simply did not have the money. I knew it was expired but I had a choice to make… drive the short distance to work with the expired registration and get it registered on my very next pay day. It was a gamble… but thankfully the cop had mercy on me.
I was retruning from a ski trip late one night, blasting the radio and rocking out-when I see blue lights flashing in the mirror. i pulled over, and this little sh*t of a state trooper (he was about 5’5") came over:
-“What’s the problem , officer”?
-" Do you realize you have a burned out tailight? I’ve been following you for 5 miles"
-“Sorry, officer, i’ll get it fixed right away”
he didn’t give me a ticket!
