The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles is redesigning the temporary paper license plate tags issued by automobile dealers. The move, announced Thursday, comes after several reports of problems with those tags.
The DMV made its announcement on the same day that police in Grand Prairie arrested a suspect who led officers on a chase while driving a vehicle with a counterfeit paper tag. One of the officers in that chase, Ofc. Brandon Tsai, died when his patrol car hit a pole during the pursuit.
State lawmakers held a hearing on the high number of counterfeit paper tags on Texas roads earlier in April. Newly-appointed Texas DMV Acting Executive Director Daniel Avitia faced questions from Rep. Terry Canales (D-Edinburg), the head of the Texas House Transportation Committee. Canales said Texas lawmakers gave the DMV the authority to make changes in 2021.
"We said...'This is an issue and here's our directive'...and it didn't happen," Canales said. "Thank God the media covered it because it's rampant."
The new security measures for paper tags announced Thursday include a watermark, embedded data and text, improved information about the vehicle, the name of the dealer, and some features that can not be digitally duplicated. They're all designed to make the paper tags more difficult to counterfeit or copy and easier for law enforcement to spot fakes.
"The abuse of fraudulent, temporary buyer tags is a huge safety issue for police patrols, and an obstruction to law enforcement investigation," Texas Department of Public Safety Assistant Chief Floyd Goodwin told the House Transportation Committee in April.
The changes are important to Grand Prairie Police Chief Daniel Scesney. He spoke about the improvements during a news conference to announce the arrest of 22-year-old Colbie Hoffman in a chase that resulted in Tsai's death.
"I'm frustrated that we're in this position. We shouldn't even be here. I'm glad we're doing something, but we've got more work to do," Scesney said. "The fact that we can have so many fictitious tags that have saturated our community is an issue. It frustrates my cops and it frustrates me."
He said tracking the source of the phony paper tag on the vehicle in that chase would be part of their investigation.
"Yes, the highest priority - including anything we can do at the legislative level to solve this problem," he said.
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