Aurora police officers are cracking down on vehicle registration violations in Colorado

When it comes to license plates, Aurora Police Sgt. Scott Benedict knows what’s real and what’s not. He says he has seen everything.

“I think the age of some of them is pretty striking because there are people who are not employed here while some of these temporary employment contracts have expired,” Benedict said.

He’s a sergeant on the Motorcycle Enforcement Team, which has been busy lately. They take tough action against drivers with bad registrations. Be it an expired license plate, fake temporary license plates or even people driving without a license plate at all. He says if you drive anywhere in Aurora you’ll see it’s a big problem.

“It’s pretty consistent. If you just drive for a few minutes you’ll probably see four or five of them,” Benedict said.

Such a big problem, in fact, that this initiative wasn’t necessarily the police’s idea. While they can always stop you for registration violations, in the end it was the people who said enough was enough.

“The citizens of Aurora notice, as we do, that they have reached out to their local elected officials. They have contacted our chief’s office and expressed concern about how many actual license plate violations there are,” Benedikt said.

He says the department understands that mistakes happen and that there are sometimes financial reasons why people don’t keep their registration current, but if you get pulled over in this summer accident, the fine isn’t cheap either.

“The fines range from $15 to $75, for those past 60 days the fine applies, plus $95.50 with surcharge,” explains Benedict.

He says while other departments may have different policies when it comes to stopping people with bad registrations, that doesn’t affect his orders.

“This concern has been raised by our chief’s office, our citizens and our council members, and we recognize it is an issue. That’s why we’re using our motorcycle enforcement team to enforce this throughout the summer,” he told Benedict.

In the first week of the raids, the police said they had already issued 75 summonses.