Write your governor and the head of DMV tell them they can save money by not printing the decals or stickers. You get a bill for registration; you pay it , it is recorded. Police run the plate on a stop or potential stop, if taxes aren’t current you get a ticket for that and what ever else they stop you for. The only loser in the deal is the company selling the stickers and the printer! Police here run plates all the time looking for wants and warrants.
Great idea! I’d go one step further and, instead of taking with you when you park, take it off and throw it on the rear deck.
As an alternative, depending on how the plate is mounted, you can use carriage bolts to mount the plates, then round over the nuts on the other side, or mount the plates in a manner that the nuts aren’t accessible from the outside. Or you could always back up to a wall with the bumper gently touching so that they can’t get to the plate at all. Perhaps you could go to a store that specializes in fasteners and buy the oddest fasteners you can find, ones that require a special, obscure tool that you could purchase at the same time.
Personally, I’m in favor or setting a trap, one involving a pit full of poisonous snakes. But since you live in California, that’s opening yourself up to a lawsuit. But surveillance cameras are cheaper than multiple stickers. Some are motion-activated and easy to conceal. Stash one in a nearby bush or window and you just may catch the cuplrit.
$20 at the California DMV for a replacement sticker. I’m too busy for this non-sense! People having nothing better to do than drive around stealing tags. It’s happened to me twice in the last 2 months. After the second time I found these guys. Time (life) saver! A little expensive but heck I already wasted too much time at the DMV… i can’t afford this BS. Best of luck. Sorry, but I’m tired of the thieves in my neighborhood. Stolen tags is probably not the worst of it, breakins are on the rise too. It might be time to move out, out of Cali…
Not reading all of the comments over six years, If my plates were getting stolen, outside of moving and getting a garage, I try the plate holder with a cover and those security screws. The kind used on rest room partitions or computers. Then at least they need a special screwdriver or socket to take the cover off. I suppose they could just use a utility knife on the cover, but I’d use thin lexon.
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Of all the elements that have to come together for a crime to be committed, the only one you have control of is opportunity. Therefore, I think you should remove or mitigate access to your car’s registration sticker. If I were living in a high crime area, I’d consider either clearing out my garage and parking my car inside it, building a detached garage, or fencing in my front yard so I can enclose the area where my car sits and my dogs could protect it.
Alternatively, you might consider putting up a security camera in the hope that the footage can aid police in catching the thief, but preventing the opportunity for the crime is your best tactic. I do everything I can to make my car and home a hard target, knowing it won’t stop a well-trained professional thief, but it will deter crime, and encourage an untrained thief to move in to a softer target than mine.
I’ve seen people who have had license plates repeatedly stolen attach attach the new one to the inside of the rear window rather than mount it in its proper location. I don’t know if it’s legal to do that in California, but my guess is the police in this particular jurisdiction have more to worry about than the OP’s license plate.
I dunno. I like the security camera idea. This year the kids are stealing the guy’s registration. Next year they’re vandalizing his garage door. Or breaking into his car.
Our cameras have caught juvenile delinquents committing property crimes against the neighborhood twice now. Had we locked the things they were messing with away, we’d never have caught them.
This year, over 60 cars got broken into citywide before they screwed up and broke into ours and got caught on video. Now they’re in jail and the break-ins have stopped. I’d suggest that’s an arguably better result than just preventing them from getting into one of the dozens they hit.
If you’re willing to undergo the inconvenience of a theft to possibly catch a thief, more power to you. I’d prefer to prevent the crime from ever being committed against me in the first place. I prefer to let someone else deal with the hassle of being a soft target, especially since not everyone who gets caught on camera is caught and punished for their crimes. After all, all they would have to do to thwart my security camera is wear a disguise.
This is in line with my approach to car maintenance too. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
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People are rarely willing to be burglarized. I have an old work truck that doesn’t fit in the garage because the garage is already full of cars. It’s staying out there no matter what. I made sure nothing was in it, and left the doors unlocked so they wouldn’t break the windows, and then let the security cameras do their job.
And now, instead of having to deal with the inconvenience of making sure everything in my yard is nailed down every night, the idiots are sitting in jail and the problem is over.
I can see both sides of this. I certainly would find it tough to leave something valuable out in the hopes of catching someone. I’d probably opt for a decoy of some sort if at all possible. On the other hand, I knew a guy that had his car stolen but thankfully recovered with very little damage. He went out and bought a cheap knock off of the club and put that on the steering wheel. Stolen and recovered yet again. So he installed an ignition defeat and put highly visible signs in the windows alerting would be thieves. Most car thieves not being mental giants, they still smashed his window and pried the ignition apart trying to steal it again. When that failed, they took out their frustration on the car’s interior and that basically totaled it.
One thing that continues to perplex me is the use of very poor resolution cameras, especially for things like banks. Back in the day, they ran continuous loops of magnetic tape that would wear out. Today, it’s all digital and yet still have these images that you can barely make out due to the lack of sufficient resolution or low light sensitivity. What good is video surveillance if the image is so poor you can’t make out any details?
“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”. - Whitney. Well said! I learned that the hard way, once having left a boom-box (yes, from the 80’s) on the rear seat. Of course, by the time I got out of class… window smashed, boom-box gone. It never happened again though… 