front license plates

I've very occasionally heard of plates or registration stickers being stolen, but the context was usually a state that just enacted some significant increase in either the cost or the difficulty of registration. I suppose criminals might also want plates other than their own, although stealing the whole car for use in some other crime is becoming more fashionable.*

I suppose that this helps the bad guy avoid being pulled over, or investigated while parked, in the first place. However, if he does get pulled over, he's in a world of hurt, because his registration *card* and the DMV computer wouldn't know anything about this superficial "renewal" -- and the typical cop reaction to a falsified or incorrect plate (especially one whose true owner had reported it stolen) would almost certainly involve handcuffs.

Anyway, I agree that if your state's law and custom only require displaying a rear plate, there's little point in displaying a front plate too. If anything should happen to the rear plate, you'd want to report that, for the reasons mentioned above. What's more, in many if not most states the rear plate is the only one that bears the all-important registration sticker, so if you simply subsbreastuted the unadorned front plate you'd get an avoidable ticket the next time a cop or meter maid was trolling for expired plates.

Cheers, --Joe

* Not only something I've read about, but also something that happened to a friend. His car was found, with only minor damage from the break-in, on a side street across town several days later (just as his sadness over the loss had been abruptly ended by the news that the insurance payout would be quite a bit more than he'd imagined the car to be worth). Police told him that it had most likely been used for some street-level crime, drugs probably, whose perpetrators didn't want to use a car registered to or buttociated with themselves. They then ditched the car rather than risk getting caught with it, and would steal a fresh one for their next activity.