They Dispense Street Justice, One Defaced License Plate at a Time | Hacker News Reader

They Dispense Street Justice, One Defaced License Plate at a Time

nytimes.com

17 pointsKaibeezy30 comments

ty for the first archival of this story that's worked!

I got a ton of appreciation for posting an archive link for the article about teen Luddites the other day. Any idea whether HN has a policy about this sort of thing?

No, it's a general thing that at least one person will typically do when a paywalled site hits the frontpage. It's greatly appreciated.

While I am normally sympathetic with sticking it to the man[0], in this case I find myself leaning to the (re-)taggers. If these scofflaws wish to civilly disobey, they would do better to remove[1] their plates entirely.

[0] cf https://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/t...

[1] instead of folding, spindling, or mutilating?

Reading the article, this seems to mostly be a safety issue. One of the guys got punched by an angry car driver and then police couldn't do anything due to the missing license plate.

Similarly, one missing/obscured plates become common enough, it gets easy for criminals to use that as a cover for a getaway car.

He got punched because he harassed a driver in public. There’s a nice phrase for his behavior: Fuck around and find out.

Given that this is illegal and police cars come with ANPR shouldn't it be fairly easy to just drive around fining people? Probably pays for itself if it really is that common.

Do automatic number plate systems detect and flag cars without plates?

I think they don't because right now people would really throw a fit if thousands of people started getting tickets for expired tags on top of already bad relations with the police. Better to save the ALPRs for heftier crimes than expired tags and bad paper plates.

Not right now but I don't think it would be hard to achieve.

Car rentals seem like the obvious place to do this. Blame it on the rent-a-car company or the previous driver, while avoiding both the toll and the egregious rent-a-car company admin fee.

Many of those vehicles belong to BIPOC and undocumented immigrants who do the necessary and underpaid jobs required for NYC to function at all.

Vigilante broken-windows policing cannot be the answer to lawless behavior.

Consider that underpaid BIPOC and undocumented immigrants are less likely to be able to own a car and are thus, as pedestrians, more at risk of injury from reckless drivers. Also consider that a $200 fine, while still unfortunate, is a hell of a lot easier to recover from than being hit by 2 tons of SUV at high speed.

Who cares?

What on earth is your point, that they shouldn't be subjected to the same enforcement expectations as everyone else?

Sad hallway monitor.

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