My entire adult life, I’ve heard various people tell me that I need to score my tabs after putting them on “so no one can steal them”. I’ve known many people like myself that find this idea absurd, and don’t bother with scoring. How did this idea become mainstream advice?
Real talk: the cops only look at the stickers if they want an excuse to pull you over.
For every thing else they run your plates- and usually before they even do that much. If your registration is current, then, they may just be letting you know they got ripped off, or checking if your drunk or just incredibly bored.
That said… if someone goes to the trouble of peeling off a sticker, it’s not going to do all that much good, and probably catch them more charges than just being unregistered.
(More likely they’d steal the entire plates. Particularly one from a similar car to yours- color, make, model, year, etc.)
I got pulled over by a cop for “expired tabs” because I was out of state and my husband had not put them on my car while I was gone and I didn’t realize. The cop walks up loudly states YOURE BEING RECORDED, points to his camera and tells me my tags are expired and he wanted my info. I had my license but not insurance on me so I had to call my spouse who’s like “can’t the cop just look it up?” The cop came up as my husband was talking over my car speakers and heard a man and was immediately deflated, hung his head, said he didn’t care and walked away like wtf??
Another poster mentioned that PA stopped requiring them a few years back (I think it was more than a few), but shortly after they stopped requiring them a NY cop pulled me over and said that was the reason. I thought that was pretty unlikely since NY cops wouldn’t waste their time on minor out of state bureaucratic issues. When I told him that they weren’t required he seemed skeptical but went back to his car. After a while he came back a said I could go.
Yup. The only reason places still use them is to give yet another pretext for stopping people.
Same, for example, the little dinky plate lamp being out, or failing to signal for the proper distance (a few hundred feet, usually.)
Cops don’t care if your car’s registration is up to date. They use it as an excuse to get to more juicy charges.
I almost got my car towed because I left for work at 8am in a spot that had no parking after 7am with tabs that were over a year due. The only reason I didn’t get towed was because I got to the car while the meter maid was still entering info before the truck took it. It was already there and just waiting for authorization
You were almost certainly getting towed regardless of your registration status. It takes maybe five minutes to slap a parking ticket on a car. Typical response time for towing is typically north of 30 minutes unless there’s some type of “it’s dangerous” involved.
That truck was there when they started their round. Probably because they were having problems with people overstaying. (Or they’re dicks.)