White to HPD: Quit writing stupid license plate tickets

Just a couple of days after the Chronicle's Matt Stiles reported that HPD was still ticketing drivers for having license plate frames despite a new law meant to prevent them from doing so, Mayor Bill White said the police department should knock if off, calling the practice of writing tickets for obstructed license plates a "gotcha system."

The 2003 law that technically allowed police to ticket drivers for having obscured plates was apparently intended to prevent people from covering their license plates with anything that would prevent the numbers from being read, but it was so broadly worded that police were able to issue citations for any part of the plate — even the motto "The Lone Star State" at the bottom and the moon, stars and space shuttle at the top. The state's top appellate court ruled that any part of the plate being covered was a violation of the law, but on May 4, Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill clarifying the law to specify that motorists could only be ticketed if half the state's name was obscured. Houston police have issued at least 9,500 tickets for obscured plates since January, 2,200 of them since Perry signed the bill in May. "Our law enforcement officers should have better things to do," White said. "We're not there to just have some gotcha system. The purpose of these moving-violation citations is to discourage unlawful behavior, not to generate the maximum amount of revenue possible."

According to Chronicle analysis of more than 10,000 tickets, HPD is writing license-obstruction citations at the rate of more than 2,000 a month — and 40 percent of those tickets were written by a group of 10 officers. In some cases, more than a dozen such tickets were written around the same time and location, which suggests, in the Chron's words, "that officers were adding the tickets as they pulled over groups of motorists near freeways." That's how most of the people Houstonist knows who've gotten such tickets ended up with them.

Do White's statements mean things will be changing? Apparently not yet: The bill Perry signed in May doesn't take effect until Sept. 1, and HPD Chief Harold Hurtt said his officers will keep writing tickets for obstructed plates until then. Even so, the mayor's comments made a little difference to Tammy Ayres, who got a ticket for having an obstructed plate May 22: "At least he sees and realizes what the rest of the public knows: that it's really not helping anybody, and it makes it look like the city is just trying to raise revenue," she said. No, really?