The City Council has done a top-notch report on the prevalence of illegal ghost plates — fake, covered, otherwise modified or expired license plates, making cars effectively unregistered — now the joint MTA/NYPD/State Police ghost plate enforcement task force should use the report as a road map to confiscate these illegal vehicles and tow them off the roads.
The report published last week by the Council’s Oversight and Investigations Committee and Chair Gale Brewer found nearly a fifth of vehicles surveyed with non-New York plates were not properly registered. That aligns with what many New Yorkers have seen with their own eyes, which is cars with out-of-state plates that are obviously driven by locals and recklessly at that. Others with ghost plates are thieves who don’t want to pay tolls or the congestion fee to enter Midtown and Downtown.
There is much work left to be done to get these scofflaw cars off the streets, though the Council study at least provides a blueprint showing they can be pretty readily found if there’s a concerted effort to look.
The Council examined 3,500 parked, unoccupied vehicles on 50 blocks across the five boroughs. The multiagency police task force, which just had its 100th enforcement action, focuses on moving vehicles by using check points at bridges. So why not just expand the task force duties to also zap parked cars with phony plates?
Legitimate plates are required equipment, making sure that vehicles are properly registered and insured and inspected. Those who cheat by using ghost plates are bypassing all the rules of the road that everyone else is following and may also be dangerous or reckless drivers.
Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News
City Council member Gale Brewer. (Theodore Parisienne for New York Daily News)
The Council report found that vehicles with improper plates had about 50% more school zone speed camera violations, for example. Ditto for red light camera violations, dangerously blocking hydrants and not paying incurred fines. And there’s a higher likelihood these ghost cars are used in crimes.
These individuals have already signaled by dint of using these ghost plates in the first place that they have no intention of being held accountable for their actions. As such, it’s not quite enough simply to ticket or cite people for using ghost plates, since they’ve already told us that they don’t have any intention of paying fines or complying.
These cars must be impounded on the spot, and we should give real consideration to whether drivers who have failed to properly register their vehicles within the system that we’ve all agreed to should really have an opportunity to get those vehicles back, and whether they should retain the privilege to keep driving at all.
Of course, drivers utilizing ghost plates and fake titles are only half of the equation. As the Council report found, there are companies openly advertising these products online in contravention of the law, and they should be treated no differently than groups selling, for example, credit card skimmers or unregistered firearms.
There is no legitimate use for fake license plates and any outfit marketing them is aiding criminal enterprise that should be expeditiously investigated by law enforcement and its operators held accountable. They are also responsible whenever these drivers who feel that they are above the law go on to crash, causing property damage, injury and even death.
Ramp up the task force, pull in more resources, make the fakes as unattainable as possible and harshly punish those who obtain them anyway; it will save many lives in the long run.
