A little while ago, I was driving home from work, when to my great surprise, the truck behind me turned on police lights and pulled me over. The policeman said there was a problem with my insurance that showed me as being lapsed. He asked for my info and went to call it in, back in his truck. He returned and said that there was some sort of problem with the computers that check insurance and that he was letting me go, but that I ought to sort it out before driving again. I went home. As it happens, there was a problem, and I fixed it before I drove again.
I’m not sure why I was pulled over, though. I wasn’t driving over the speed limit or missing a stop sign or any other sort of vehicular naughtiness that would draw attention to me. Do police just randomly call in license plate numbers in the hopes that they’ll find a problem? If so, how did they know there was a problem enough to stop me, yet be unable to know it after they’d pulled me over?
This was in CT, USA, if that makes a difference.
Automatic license plate scanners are becoming commonplace and are often equipped in police cars. Never give Johnny Law a reason to pull you over.
Yikes! Good thing I fixed the problem!
Thanks for the info.
I had no idea about this. It explains why I was pulled over recently. I had received the new tabs for my car license but hadn’t put them on yet due to the wet weather. When the cop pulled me over, I thought it was for the expired tabs so I told him I had the current tabs at home. He said “I know you car is up to date but you have a brake light out. I just wanted you to know.” He then left. It felt very weird at the time.
The other nefarious use is for parking duration violations. Remember in the good old days when meter maids used to mark your tires with a chalk stick? Now they drive around in a van with an automated plate reader and then come back in x amount of time and then give you a ticket. So you can’t even come back and check if your car has been marked. I’ve been told that in the next town over, they don’t even bother leaving a parking ticket on your windshield. They just mail it to you!
The local cops don’t ‘call in’ license plates any more – they have what basically amounts to a laptop computer in their car, and get quite deft at typing any plates they see, as they drive.
I see there was a link to an automatic plate scanner, and I’ll assume that was the case. My guess is there was a problem with a computer that checks your insurance but an actual phone call or a manual check via a different database cleared it up.
FTR, in some places, cops do sit there and randomly check plates.
Back when I was in college, I was out driving with a friend of mine in his new car. He had bought it literally an hour or two earlier and moved his plates from his old car to the new one. He got pulled over because the plates didn’t match the vehicle they were on. Other then that, we were doing nothing wrong whatsoever. What, at the time, seemed odd to me, is that every scrap of paper work for the new car was with his dad. It seemed to us, we could have put those plates (which would be linked to his name/ID) on any car and had said he just bought it that day. So we were a bit surprised that the cop returned to the car about 5 minutes later and said we were free to go…after a second cop showed up and checked the IDs of everyone else in the car.
Looking back at it now, I’m going to guess that cop called in ‘somewhere’ and matched the VIN to either his name or the plates and just found that their computer hadn’t been updated yet.
To this day, 12 years later, I’m grateful to someone that I still consider one of my best friends, and one of the other passengers in the car for saying “Why don’t we wait until we cross the city line before you light that joint.” That night would have ended differently. But being a college town, I get the feeling they were typically looking for reasons to pull students over. At one point, the city with the college passed a law saying the cops could pull over people smoking cigarettes in their car if they felt they looked under 18. Which I assume was just a way for cops to pull people over that they thought were smoking pot in their car. Since most of the dorms were non-smoking, most people would go for a quick drive to get high.
Yeah, kind of Big Brother-y.
I’m now feeling paranoid, waiting for a cop to walk up to my window and say “I know you only had one beer an hour ago, and that you didn’t have your seat belt on for the first two blocks, but don’t worry, I’m just warning you that you didn’t come to a complete stop in Akron last week”.
You think license plate scanners are Big Brother-y, there are now available eye glasses that cops can wear that will scan a crowd, recording up to 400 faces at a time, that will be compared to the biometric data of criminals on file. Then they show a little red dot over the face of the suspect in the crowd so the cop can check him out.
The police in Brazil plan to use them during the upcoming World Cup soccer games to scan the crowd.
This explains how I got pulled over a few weeks ago for expired tags. It was dark out and the cop must have been 100 feet or more behind me when he hit the lights to pull me over. There’s no way he could have seen a 1" square sticker from that far away.
Ok, I’m in CT too and I find this very creepy. What happened to probable cause? I know it’s not that simple, but it still feels intrusive.
Maybe it’s just that I watch too many cop chase shows, or it’s more accepted in the UK, but I don’t have a problem with ANPR. It seems fairly standard. There are tons of people driving around with no insurance and it causes havoc, so why not catch them and tell them off?
Yes, but on the other hand, we make a big deal about not allowing profiling, and we demand probable cause - these are good things. The cops are staying within the rules by automating calling in plates and checking to see if tags are up to date - something they do anyway, but just more efficiently.
Upshot would seem to be more people are stopped for expired tags and no insurance, and less people are stopped for looking ethnic.
That’s true, hadn’t thought about it that way. I guess universal intrusion is better than biased intrusion.
Got a ticket 2 years ago that was printed on a printer connected to a laptop in the cop’s car. They no longer write tickets in many places, they print them.
I once heard of a story (from Australia) about some pranksters who took the license plate off a mobile speeding/radar vehicle, affixed it to their own car, then drove past the same vehicle several times over the limit, generating tickets against the police.
I thought it was hilarious. But a childhood friends, now a cop, thought my attitude was pro-crime, and unfriended me on FB. Actually, I am anti-Big-Brother.
He might have unfriended you for believing unlikely urban legends 
Are you really hot?
Driving while hot is enough to get you pulled over in some circumstances.
The scanner stuff just provides the legal excuse.
Tris
I think there are a bunch of problematic uses for this sort of technology, and i tend to agree with the ACLU that the biggest issue is the maintenance of a database of people’s movements. Using the technology to find out who has expired tags or no insurance or outstanding warrants is one thing, but keeping information on every car that the machine runs is something quite different.
But i’m afraid i don’t see anything too nefarious in using it for parking violations. You know when you park how long you have, and the easiest way to avoid a ticket is to leave before that amount of time expires. You have no constitutional right to a chalk-mark on you tires; they are not placed there for your benefit, but so that the parking enforcement officer can keep track of how long the car had been parked. All the new technology does is change the method for keeping track of how long cars have been there.
The way I see it, if you don’t have an issue with the government requiring you to have a license plate on your car, or paying a tax to use the car on public roads, or to carry liability insurance, then you shouldn’t have a problem with the government checking your plate (which is in plain sight) to check the government run data base to see if you are following the these laws.