General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: The case for a well-funded organization for wrongful death lawsuits against cops who kill. [View all]MineralMan
(146,317 posts)sending a notice to the registered owner of the vehicle by mail would do the trick, I think.
That could be automated, without any real problem. It would be even easier if license plates included an RFID chip that would respond to a police query. If all of the cars I see with a taillight out got such notifications, that would be a nice safety thing, really. Police rarely pull someone over for that, unless they have some other reason, good or bad, to pull the driver over.
Of course, RFID chips in license plates would be objected to by many people, no doubt, since they would provide a means of tracking vehicles. But license plate cameras are doing that already in many places.
Maybe, instead, the car could have RFID that returned the VIN for that vehicle. That would lead to the recovery of a lot of stolen cars, I think. Where I live, most stolen cars just get another license plate installed and they get driven everywhere. In my part of Minnesota, most stolen cars get Wisconsin plates, which are easily stolen just across the border.
The police are not watching closely for stolen cars. There's no ticket revenue in that, really, and pulling over stolen cars is more than a little dangerous. In most of the smaller cities, pullovers are generally a revenue-enhancement measure, so police are encouraged to stop people where a ticket will lead to a nice big fine.