I know its normal to get asked for license, registration, and proof of insurance. But why ask for the registration? When I register every year, the county sends me a sticker with the plate number and expiration date to stick on the lic plate. The cops van see the plate and date right? Plus I’m sure they run the plate when they pull you over anyway. Seems to me they already know the registration status.
So why do they still ask for the registration paper?
Pulling people over for traffic violations is largely a money making scheme. Why remove the law from the books when computers are widely available when you can still add a fine for people who either don’t have theirs or have an old one?
Tangent
I wonder how much of the shitty societal problems are just rich people passing fear and purity to try to avoid paying taxes
Most I imagine.
I don’t get pulled over often but I haven’t Ben asked for registration in a long time. They do ask for license and insurance though.
This is the correct answer. Last time I was pulled over the officer only asked for my license, actually.
“May I see your license, please?”
“Yes sir.”
“Thanks. Are you aware that your passenger brake light is out?”
“No sir.”
“Get that fixed as soon as you can. Here’s your license. Drive safe.”
In fairness, I’m a middle aged white man, so I’m aware that I run basically every police interaction in easy mode.
They don’t? The state removed the requirements to have your rego sticker on the left side of the windscreen because the police access to the registration database maintained by the department of main roads.
The state
Which state? It’s different everywhere. Most still require you to put registration stickers (AKA tags) on your license plate.
I believe they were answering from the perspective of an Australian. The rest of the world gets the shits with the internet assuming an American perspective by default.
In what countries?
This has all been computerized since the late 80s. They know if the car has a valid registration before they get out of the car, either by calling in your plates or by typing it into a terminal in the car. But since you are required to carry the registration in the car, not having it is something they can cite you for and make a few more bucks off of you.
The police are prosecution. They claim they don’t have quotas, but with any job, there are unsaid quotas.
I worked in IT help desk, and I was told our department wasn’t opening and closing enough tickets to justify our department’s existence. So I changed the sensitivity of our network monitoring system for our SDWAN and wrote a script that would automatically create a ticket and close it pretty much if a single packet was lost. I was hailed a hero as the bean counter CTO wasn’t going to review the actual tickets, but he got the metrics he needed for the meeting.
This kept a team of 14 quality support technicians employed. This stupid trick I rolled out over a weekend kept families fed for a good five years, delaying the inevitable layoff.
And we all found better jobs and left at our own pace.
But I digress, it isn’t like the police work on commission (eh… well drugs disappear… and bribery and extortion exist…) but if you aren’t writing tickets, then the prosecutor is going to bitch because they aren’t handling enough tickets to justify the department of prosecution.
So cops will look for any packet loss. Registration is said lost packet. The same for insurance, any discrepancy in your license, and if your license plate isn’t perfectly mounted on your vehicle. Just fucking anything.
You have insurance but don’t have the latest card on you? They will write a ticket. You take the insurance card to the county clerk and they throw the ticket out and cancel the court date. Makes no difference to the cop, as it boosted his KPI.
“Yay, I am halping! Pay me!” Oh, how the bureaus will burrow.
They like to have a reason to make you open your glovebox so that they can see inside and maybe catch you with a joint or some loose pills
Do they? I haven’t gotten a paper registration in a couple of years. It’s a state by state thing though.
I know they sometimes ask if you’re from a different state, and if their system is down in some places, but as more states do away with paper copies that’s going to disappear. I suspect you’re just in a location that hasn’t gotten there yet.
I got pulled last month for some piddly shit, and all the cop asked for was licence
Hell, I caught a ticket for not carrying my registration on a canoe. They always fuck with me because they assume I’m running a trolling motor without registration, despite the perfectly legal numbers I put on the side.
“Your license. Where’s your license?” “It’s back there on the bumper, man!”
Upvote for the up in smoke reference.
We get asked for license and insurance, no registration.
Stickers can be forged. Checking your papers against a database is a lot more certain. The sticker is just there (or out of date) to justify pulling you over.
And it’s common for vehicle thieves to swap plates on vehicles that they steal. They may want to check to match the registration and the plate.
Nah. The plate either matches the vehicle or it doesn’t. Sure, you can steal one from a very similar car, but then that tag is in the db for being stolen. Not having that piece of paper is one more angle for getting probable cause to fuck with you, and deliver a ticket.
Some cases they don’t need your license either, they can see an image of your license by entering your name and birthdate into their cars computer.
Right. I would think all this was readily available from a police DB
I’ve been pulled over because they saw my license was suspended. Later I learned that case law prohibits that from being used as probable cause.
Most plates that are stolen are used right away, before they’re even called in.
but then that tag is in the db for being stolen.
Not if you put the plates from the stolen car onto that car and that car’s owner doesn’t notice…
Fair point! I’d guess one can go quite some time like that.
Because how do they know you didn’t just steal a sticker? Those stickers don’t have anything on them to prove you actually registered the vehicle. Just a color and a date period.
Because when they pull you over and sit in their car for a minute before getting out, they are calling in your license plate number and make/model/color of the car. The dispatcher types it into their system and radios back to the officer with the owners name, address, whether the registration is valid, and whether the owner has any warrants out for them. They will automatically have all the information about the registration before they even get out of their car.
This is based on my personal experience as a campus police dispatcher in college more than 40 years ago. I’m sure by now, they have data terminals in the car they can type it in and look it up themselves.
They do have terminals, called MDT’s (mobile data terminals). If the permissions are set for it in CAD, they can look things up. Your comment made me realize I do still hear them call for the info over the radio occasionally, though.
Why even bother with the sticker then lol
These were phased out in Australia like 20.years ago.
I’m not sure it’s possible to convey how absolutely deadlocked any legal changes have become in the US. Jon Stewart fought for years to get September 11th first-responders the healthcare they were promised, it was a single page of extremely popular bi-partisan legislation.
The system is as it is because that’s the way it was in the 90s or so, and since there’s no pressing need and no one has a reason to fight for years to change this particular aspect it will continue this way. Possibly for the next millennia or so.
And there was a recent supreme court decision that basically neutered federal agencies like the EPA, so things will probably be even more tied to congressional slowness.
The stickers in Florida have the tag number on the sticker. Very obvious if its on the wrong tag.
US issue
They ask for vehicle registration papers in Germany too.
Papers Please.
Netherlands, same here.
Just another thing they can use to fuck with you and maybe get to write you a ticket for.
Or, if you’re black, they then have an excuse to shoot you as you reach for it. “Looked like he was reaching for a weapon. I feared for my life!”
In California, proof of payment for a vehicle registration renewal is allowed as proof of registration, specifically to cover the period after the payment is sent but before the DMV has issued the registration and corresponding sticker. So even if the DMV hasn’t received the payment in the mail, if a motorist can show some sort of proof (eg a bill pay transaction on their phone), that is acceptable.
Also, the DMV here will issue one-day registrations, in order to allow a vehicle to be driven from one storage location to another. If a motorist has a proper one-day registration, that won’t necessarily show up on the police computer, but is nevertheless legit.
Both of those cases would only apply if the cop’s computer shows the vehicle as unregistered, hence why the cop would ask in those cases. It doesn’t explain why they ask for it every time, even when the vehicle is registered normally.
It’s also a chance for cops to look in the glove box, where most people keep their registration. Or to smoke out people who stole a car and thus don’t know precisely where the registration is.
But those are ancillary reasons for cops asking about registration. I figured OP only wanted the bona fide, entirely-defensible reasons.
Traffic stops are often used by police as justification for further engagement, searches, etc. Any small violations, like not having license, registration, or proof of insurance readily available, gives the cops leverage to pressure people into answering questions without waiting for a lawyer, or allowing their car to be searched, etc., as the driver hopes that being cooperative will motivate the cop to overlook the ticketable offenses. This is why police orgs are so often against policies ideas like making traffic enforcement separate from criminal police work.
Still possible to be asked where I am, but less so since the stickers have the plate number on them.
In my country, we get asked to blow into the breathalyzer. That’s the only thing they haven’t figured out how to make digital.
It’s an analog breathalyzer?
Let me smell your breath. … yeah you’ve been drinking
They mean digital, as in using digits, as in fingers and toes. They’re talking about sticking fingers in your butt.
You can feel the alcohol then?
It certainly does not look cloud-connected, AI-enabled, or requiring a subscription…
Well that’s good. Im sure it is digital in the same way as a calculator or a clock, but analog in the pure sense is a funny idea.
