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Some states have a distinction of 'primary' and 'secondary' traffic offenses: primary offenses can be justification for a police stop and citation at any time, while secondary offenses can only be issued where a stop has already begun under reasonable suspicion of a primary offense, or another citation is already being issued.
Depending on offense, the theory is either that the secondary offenses are intended to augment other errors (eg, speeding a few MPH at night while your headlights are broken is much worse than speeding a few MPH), or that enforcement of the law while a vehicle in motion is so impractical that it would more often be used as justification for improper or illegal stops than for true enforcement (eg, you aren't going to be able to tell if a driver has buckled their seatbelt fully at 80 MPH on a freeway no matter how good your eyes are), or that the law is intended more as a guideline and it has been abused in the past (eg, pulling someone over for a single broken tail lights was notorious as a pretext for other searches, rather than an opportunity to tell people to get the light fixed).
That said, while New York has considered such a distinction, I don't know the state of the current law there or in Washington. And sometimes this is a policy thing, rather than a statute one.
The US is an insane place. Here missing plates are treated with as much suspicion as hiding your face when walking past a cop. Being caught with fake plates results in your driving license suspended for a year. Making your plates intentionally unreadable and getting caught twice - suspension for 3 months.
Texas just got rid of temporary tags because there’s too many fakes, too- this isn’t just a blue state thing.
Sounds like a problem that is easy to solve. Have speed and lane control cameras scan every plate they see. If they see a fake plate, alert the nearest patrol car. Texas Highway Patrol makes ~7500 traffic stops a day. If just 10% of these stops will be about plates, that's 750 drivers punished each day.
The system that most plate-scanning mechanisms utilize wouldn't be able to keep up with this volume, I think.
It's also illegal to use said system for plate-scanning, but they do it anyways. And continue to do so; who knows how that court case would work out.
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Traffic control cameras are illegal in Texas.
That's some goddamn horseshoe theory in action. California and Texas on the same side of speed camera use debate?
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