Ticket for missing front plate (mild)

The BBQ Pit
1

I recently returned from a business trip to find a $25 ticket on my car for not having a front license plate. I was parked in a city airport lot (Lot B at LAX, for you LADopers).

In this thread, it is suggested that if you show the judge you replaced the plate, he may waive the ticket for a nominal fee. I don’t have time to appear in court, I lost the front plate years ago, and the mounting nuts on my car are broken, so I just ate the ticket. My solution is not to park in the city lot anymore. The odds of getting ticketed any other time (barring while being stopped for something else) are evidently small, since I drove without a front plate for five years and never got cited.

None of the above really concerns me, except that in the above-linked thread, pkbites characterizes this as “an alert cop who was doing his job”. What a load. Tickets like this are an exercise in revenue collection, pure and simple. The image of a cop circling the lot hoping to find someone with a missing front plate instead of fighting crime is pathetic. Someone could well have been liberating a stereo from another car in the lot at the same time as Joe Friday was writing me up for being short one plate. As peaceful and safe a community as Los Angeles is, someone is out there committing all the murders, and he’s probably in full compliance with our license plate display laws. An alert cop doing his job! Poppycock and folderol. Take my $25, but please respect my intelligence.

This doesn’t even qualify as a rant, but I didn’t want to break the rule against personal attacks in other forums.

2

Well, whether you like it or not, for better or for worse, the State of California requires all motor vehicles to have both a front and a rear license plate properly displayed. This being the case, the officer was doing his job, and hewasalert*, cause he nailed you. You don’t have to like it, but whining about it changes nothing.

3

You’ve got to be kidding me - you got a ticket for missing a plate? You should move to Calgary, where nobody ever gets tickets for anything on or off or broken or obscured or expired on their cars. Seriously. Plates off or obscured, no lights working, taillights broken, it just doesn’t seem to matter here. Of course, we are way understaffed for cops per capita. They have to concentrate their manpower on the important stuff, like radar traps and photoradar.
(Just for the record, we don’t have front plates in Alberta.)

4

That sucks, paying for parking and get a ticket to boot. It ain’t good policy. Hope your luck don’t run out and all those alert police start leaving love notes on the winshield.

5

My dad had a Corvette that he refused to put the front plate on. He said it ruined the look of the car. He carried the front plate inside - sometimes on the dash, sometimes behind the seat. He got stopped every so often, but the cops always let him off almost because he had it with him. He did get one once when he’d left it at home.

6

I agree with Kiger 's dad - my Z28 looks stupid with the front plate. I never attached it (permanently) until after my second ticket given to me by the same lady motorcycle cop (who hangs out at the intersection of National and Sepulveda in WLA by the way). I decided that the look of my car isn’t worth the hassle of getting pulled over every few months. I was told the reason why they were cracking down is because of the traffic cameras.

Oh, and since this is the pit - fuck front license plates :smiley:

7

Sorry to hijack, but I have a question about this now.

If I, a Michigan resident with a Michigan plate (we only have the rear plate), am in California, can I get ticketed for not having a front plate on my car? That would be a pretty crappy thing to encounter on my vacation.

8

I’m pretty sure not.

9

Nothing useful, just sharing a similar story:

I pulled up to the gate of an Air Force Base in the midwest about 3AM once. The gate guard told me that THIS base has a regulation requiring both plates be displayed. I informed the guard my car was registered in a state which did not issue two license plates (North Carolina).

The guard called some one in North Carolina at 4AM EST to verify this.

You may call him an alert guard who was only doing his job. I call him a jerk wasting my time because he has nothing better to do. To-MAY-to, to-mah-to, whatever.

10

A cop can write the ticket, but there is a valid defense.

Several years ago, I had to go to traffic court in Norfolk, Virginia. A guy ahead of me came from a one-plate state and had had a ticket issued for not having the front plate. Discussing the issue with the police officer at the time went nowhere; the cop was sure he needed two plates.

The guy went to traffic court to defend the ticket. In the meantime, he’d gotten a copy of the requisite law from his home state. The judge perused this, and gave the cop a thorough dressing-down about wasting the Court’s time, and if he were going to remain a cop in a military town, he’d best learn which states only have one plate.

Robin

11

Probably not.

We had a case in Texas where a cop pulled over a vehicle for not displaying a front plate. The vehicle was registered in Coahuilia, so it did not need a front plate. The cop could not see the state name on the plate until he had pulled the driver over, because the name was obscured. He ended up not citing the driver for the plate, but was able to bust the driver on a drug charge. There was an appeal, and the charge was vacated / conviction overturned based on the fact that the traffic stop was illegal because he should not have been pulling over a car registered in Coahuilia for missing the front plate. This led to the new law in Texas that the state name must be clearly visible, and not obscured in any way, on all plates on your car – which has made most license plate frames illegal.

12

After reading this thread, I’m wondering - are there any states in the United States which require a front plate but not a rear one?

13

Not a very good one. Try this: FUCK FRONT LICENSE PLATES UP THE SHITPIPE WITH A BURNING CHAINSAW!!!111111

:smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

14

You’d think if it was so important someone would have given overachiever a list of which states require two plates and which don’t.

Who the hell did he call at that hour?

15

I doubt it.

The police rarely follow you from the front.

16

I received a ticket just over a year ago for the same offense. I was a Michigan native, living in Chicago, and not only was the idea of a “city parking sticker” new to me ($100???), but so was the whole front/rear plate thing. So, I got two plates, and had no place to put the front one (my car, bought in Michigan, had no front mounting plate).

Instead of getting it mounted, I stuck the front plate on my dashboard near the windshield. Worked fine for three years until a just over a year ago when my car was heavily covered in snow. Got a ticket, because apparently you couldn’t see the front plate while the car was covered in snow. It would have been easier for the cop to brush off my car than to squeeze between my car and the one parked in front of me to check on my plate status, but oh, well. I just ate the ticket.

Side note: I first noticed I had two plates to mount when I switched from my Michigan plates to my Illinois plates. Was very confused. I had been living in Chicago for a year, and my old plates were about to expire, so it was time to become an official Chicagoan and swap plates.

Thing was, I was in the suburbs at an Arlington Heights research facility when I decided to switch plates. I got there early (had overestimated the commuting time from the city) and the facility wasn’t open yet, so I figured it was as good a time as any to perform the switch.

It didn’t quite hit me that the research facility was located above a bank.

Some…um…responsible citizen saw me changing my plates in the bank parking lot, and called the cops, convinced I was about to perform an armed robbery. I remember sitting in my car, new plates on, watching a couple people across the parking lot eyeball, speak into a phone, watch me warily some more, etc. I kind of thought it was funny, then I made the mental connection of what I had done…just as a police car pulled up behind me. I think he was less annoyed by my action than by the paranoid good samaritans. Oh…and it was on my birthday. :slight_smile: