Some places have cops that are sitting there run plates they see.And let's NOT FORGET, the police would have had to have RUN THE PLATE to know it was a mis-match. They didn't PULL HIM OVER for that - they saw a black guy in a car and just decided he looked suspicious.What??? No. That is not equal to stealing cars.The list of his previous crimes needs some clarification. The "unlawful use of a motor vehicle" is really stealing cars. I wonder if the car he drove that fateful day was stolen or why else there would be fake plates on it. So far, the police won't confirm this one way of the other:
People around here do that all the time. They have three cars and one license plate. Or they keep old plates from previous cars so that they have a plate while driving around, but that plate was long ago made inactive, but they don’t have money to register or insure the current one. It’s not legal, but they do own all the cars, and none of them are stolen. This one might be stolen, but the mis-matched plate is not what proves it.
There are also automatic plate readers but whether they can figure out the plate doesn't match the car I don't know.