Licence Plate Displayed behind Windsheild

[Kevin1a]

Surely this is illegal, however I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on the motivations for doing this. I was in Denver a while back and I was driving around downtown. It must have been 1 or 2 in the morning and I hit a fast food drive through. As I pulled through I stopped in the dark parking lot to eat. While sitting there an other vehicle pulled up. It looked like some kind of rice burner and had tinted windows. I saw the driver reach down and grab a license plate of the floor or out of the glove box and attach it to a mount on the inside of the windshield. My guess is that he was racing and he doesn't want the cops to see his plates. I don't know what he did with the rear plates.

Recently in Colorado Springs (1 hour south), I saw a Mustang and Neon doing the same thing. They were driving up an east side expressway, not speeding excessively, but I saw the guy in the mustang fumbling with his plates, and neither vehicle had rear plates.

Anyways, how common is this? Is it almost always racing related, or are there other reasons people do the plate in the window thing?

I tried to find some info on google, but I really couldn't find much of anything except some yahoo answers questions.

[Citicop]

Those would be improperly displayed here. Ticketable or arrestable (if necessary).

-Citicop.

[Samuel]

You need to ask the people who are doing it.

[Curt581]

It could be a couple reasons. A big one is theft or damage. The are sections of my area where theft of plates or cutting the rear plate to get the sticker is a daily occurence. The law says you can't cover the plate with anything, so what do you do? People tape the plate up inside the back window. Yeh, it's Improper Display, but...

Racing is a possibility, but more likely is the driver just doesn't want to be identified if the police try to stop him. He's more likely to willing to take off if he knows we don't have a ready way to find out who he is. More common with motorcycles than cars.

[ethomas]

I know for a fact that at least in CA, the law regarding Lisence plate positioning is only that it be legible, always presented (so no moving it around when you want it to be up or not) and that it fall between certain, very liberally defined height ranges (somewhere between like 12 and 60 inches). As long as there's a mount so the plate isn't wobbling around everywhere, or the windows are so tinted as to render it illegible, its perfectly legal in CA. I believe that many other states follow this law as well.
In terms of who would want to do it, I would suppose anybody who wants quick access to remove his/her plates, or somebody who's plate mount on their car has stripped holes or something.

[MikeG]

I've never received a photo citation. Would the ability of the photo equipment be impaired by this mounting location (i.e .no lighting)?

The latest fad here is sanding off the reflective background paint which makes it harder to see (especially in low light). I think it's all related to photo radar.

When automated cameras were introduced, they changed to law for temporary plates here and moved them from the rear windshield to the license plate location. This makes me think it might be camera related.