The Chronicle‘s Matt Stiles reports that Mayor White has reversed a decision by his bumbling, absentee police chief on the matter of continuing to ticket motorists for what are technically license plate frame violations (despite amendments to the law that take effect in a few months):
Calling the practice a “gotcha system,” Mayor Bill White on Monday said Houston police shouldn’t ticket motorists for having common brackets around their license plates that will no longer be illegal when a revised state law takes effect in September.
The department had been issuing the $98 tickets under a broadly worded state statute intended to prevent motorists from trying to evade authorities by obscuring their plates.
The state’s top appellate court ruled recently that the law’s wording meant that any covering of the plate — even the stars, moon or state nickname — was a violation.
The Houston Chronicle reported Sunday that officers had issued at least 9,500 such tickets since January, including 2,200 since Gov. Rick Perry signed a bill that would allow drivers to have brackets advertising car dealers or touting alumni affiliations.
White said he planned to tell both Police Chief Harold Hurtt and the city’s top prosecutor, Randy Zamora, that motorists shouldn’t be punished if an officer can reasonably determine the state and plate numbers.
“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.”
Good for Mayor White.
And good for Matt Stiles, whose reporting on this matter obviously made a difference.
The Editorial LiveJournalists had an amusing Me-Me moment today on the same topic:
One ticket recipient, a freelance journalist who writes editorials for the Chronicle, was ticketed the morning after Hurtt made his comments to the paper’s editorial board.
That’s one way to get the attention of the Editorial LiveJournalists!
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