An Aurora city councilwoman says she will ask the FBI to investigate the Police Department over allegations that officers targeted and harassed an attorney who represented the family of a man shot by police.
Attorney Derek Cole says officers ran his license plate through a criminal database 20 times and last month unjustly towed his legally parked car for improper registration.
"These people have been watching me and trying to figure out a way to shut me up, shut me down and take me out," said Cole, who is the attorney for the family of Darius Murray.
Murray, 19, was shot by Aurora police May 9. Officers say he fired at them first.
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_12863217
The police are claiming that this is typical behavior on their part and that cars often have their plates ran that many times. Of course they are also claiming that how many times a vehicles plates are ran is private information, and so there is no way for an actual study to be done to determine what is actually typical. I guess they just want us to accept their word for it, and they even give an example of an undercover police car that had its plates ran 22 times in 18 months. However, I expect that an undercover police car might be atypical of an average citizens car because it is likely that the undercover agent would intentionally be near criminal activity as it is occurring or recently occurred, and otherwise be located in high crime areas. That is if we can even believe the polices claim that the undercover cars plates were ran that many times.
The police are also claiming that they run plates so often in an effort to locate stolen cars. License plates are not about preventing or locating stolen cars. If they were then a license plate would be factory installed and unique to the car and it would not be removable. It would be more like a VIN number. The fact is that a license plate does very little to prevent or locate a stolen car. If a car is stolen to be stripped or resold, the license plate is the first thing to be removed, that spot may just be left empty, it may be replaced by a fake plate, or it may be replaced by a paper plate in the window or at least a piece of paper that resembles a dealer paper plate. It is unlikely that the plate would remain for long as it is very easy to remove, and the criminals know that without a plate it is very hard for a cop to determine much about the car without actually running the vin and that is a much more difficult proposition as the cop cannot just run a vin while sitting at a stop light. License plates are about revenue generation and little else. Even in the story above the lawyers car was towed because the registration came back as expired by mistake (or that is the claim), not because it was a stolen plate or car.
Recent Comments