Just thought I would post this:
For public vehicles in LA, there are public plates which say "public" on them, regular plates that are registered to the vehicle in question, and regular plates that are registered to ghost companies.
Marked patrol cars, other city/parish vehicles, get public plates. Cars for detectives, mayors, parish presidents, city council members/parish police jury members (nothing to do with police at all, just a name,) tend to get regular plates but registered to the vehicle and city/parish. Ghost plates are for UC LE work, internal affairs types, certain state government vehicles used for VIP security, a small number for private companies in the executive protection business.
For years, this system has worked well. Slight problems have cropped up when PDs or SOs have tried to use regular private plate vehicles to work street level narcotics stuff, of course (the plate numbers tend to be issued in groups and share prefixes––-making them easily made after a while,) but all doable. Until Eddie Price. The (now former) Mayor of Mandeville. Who got ghost plates for his city issued take home, and who got caught driving it drunk (on camera.) Repeatedly. Did I say repeatedly? Because everyone in south LA got to see it several times on TV and on the Times Picayune online site.
So the state revised the procedures for issuing ghost plates, to include more stringent investigations into actual need for ghost plates before issuing them. I cannot argue with this––good idea.
But I do have a problem with this:
All passenger plates in LA start with three letters, followed by three numbers, as such: ABC123
All of our new ghost plates?
Yeah. The idiots at LA OMV set aside a series for the entire state this time, instead of doing it randomly as the plates get issued.
Seriously.
All of our ghost vehicles, in the whole state as far as I can tell, have the exact same three letter prefix. And it spells a three letter word. It ain't even just three letters, like the old "GDF," "FAE," or "IEY" plates that used to mean police car in the past few years when they did this crap before––––it actually spells a word now. A common word everyone knows. And every dang UC or IA car in the state will now have this plate prefix.
Ugh. Maroons. All of 'em. Maroons.
ETA: Took out an old mate's name and tossed back in the deliberately wrong word from Bugs Bunny, as I intended from the start––––derp.