Q: A news site has an article about it now being illegal to have a license plate frame on your vehicle, and the author thought the cars she saw being pulled over were because of license plate frames. What’s the problem with license plate frames? This seems like the laws are going too far.

A: I’m not a lawyer. I’m a traffic safety nerd trying to help other people become safer road users. I point this out because when I read the law, I reached a conclusion that I subsequently found ran counter to that of many law enforcement agencies. I can’t write you a ticket, and they can, so you’re safer going with their interpretation than mine.

With that out of the way, last year the legislature made a change to the license plate law. The article you referenced made this seem like a huge change. I’ll give you three reasons why it’s not.

First, the law has always prohibited license plate frames that obscure any information on the plate. Here’s what’s new – the word ‘cover’ was added to the law. The article you read conflated frames with plate covers. Plate covers are typically plastic, sometimes tinted, and go over the entire plate. Frames go around the perimeter and have branding from your car dealer or phrases like, “My other car is also terrible.” You can have a license plate frame, as long as it doesn’t cover the state name, plate numbers, and registration tag.

Second, I went out and counted how many cars had license plate covers. Of more than 100 cars, only one had a plate cover, protecting a paper temporary plate. If my observations are representative, this change affects a fraction of a percent of drivers.

Third, police have higher traffic safety priorities than searching for that one in more than 100 drivers with a license plate cover.

Now, the controversy. In the part called “Unlawful acts,” it states that it is unlawful to “use license plate holders, frames, covers, or other materials that conceal, obstruct, distort, change, alter, or make a license plate or plates illegible.” A new section of the law about enforcement refers to “license plate covers that make a license plate illegible.”

So tinted covers, for sure not legal. But reading that, I thought a clear, non-obstructing cover would be legal. Many law enforcement agencies, and a legislator who sponsored this bill, say it applies to all covers, because even clear covers can make a plate harder to read, especially for automated plate readers. There are companies selling plate covers, pitching that same argument to convince people to buy them. The problem is, those companies are lying. Real-world testing shows that traffic cameras have no trouble reading plates with clear covers. It seems then that clear covers would be legal, but again, I’m in the minority here.

What does any of this have to do with traffic safety? I mean, besides the importance of being able to read the plate of a fleeing driver after a crash (or other crime). Who puts a license plate cover on their car designed to obscure their plate? A driver who intends to break the law and is hoping to get away with it. For law enforcement, a dark plate cover is like a megaphone shouting, “Look at me, I’m planning to violate traffic laws!” It’s also an indicator of a problem with our driving culture. We won’t reach our goal of eliminating traffic fatalities while there are drivers who make it their goal to get away with as much as they can.

Doug Dahl is with the Traffic Safety Commission and writes a weekly column for this newspaper.