At a north-side stoplight just before noon one recent weekday, Allen County Sheriff Ken Fries pulled up behind a car sporting a partly snow-covered white and tan license plate emblazoned with images of a deer and turkey.

Or it might have been a duck. Fries couldn’t really say.

“I have no idea what that plate is,” said Fries, who described what could have been the state’s National Wild Turkey Federation plate. “I can’t even tell what state it’s from.”

Hoosiers currently have 104 license plate designs to choose from when they visit the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

Having that many options is a problem for some police officers, who say it is hindering proper vehicle identification.

Whether at a routine traffic stop or a crime scene – where witnesses may get the number off a suspicious vehicle’s plate but not know what type of plate it was – the specialty plates are costing officers precious time and in some cases keeping them from correctly identifying a vehicle entirely.

“It used to be so simple when you just had a state plate and a truck plate,” Fries said.

Same numbers

Most specialty plates are sponsored by organizations, which have to get at least 500 people registered to buy their proposed plates before the state will make the plate available for purchase, according to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

Some of the proceeds of each plate go to the organization that sponsors the plate and part goes to the bureau.

Last year, more than 442,000 specialty plates were sold, which generated $11 million for the sponsoring groups and more than $6 million for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, according to BMV spokesman Graig Lubsen.

In the past three years, about 30 new plate designs have been approved by the bureau, Lubsen said.

According to Lubsen, bureau officials consulted with law enforcement officials several years ago about how to make specialty plates easily identifiable. The plates were given a basic white background with black lettering, with the sponsor’s logo on the left side.

What wasn’t done back then was ensure that no two license plates would have the same sequence of numbers.

Officials are correcting this as new plates are issued, Lubsen said, and the state is redoing its number sequencing for plates. The process should be completed by 2013, Lubsen said.

Still, though the chances are slimmer, someone with a Ducks Unlimited plate could have the same license plate number as someone with a Indiana Heritage Trust plate.

This could cause confusion for an officer who has to call the number into dispatchers during a traffic stop or for someone who sees a car leaving a crime scene.

“That’s currently being taken care of,” Lubsen said. “Every plate should have a unique number.”

No updates

In Kosciusko County, sheriff’s officers have complained that the Bureau of Motor Vehicles does not let them know when new specialty plates are introduced or old ones are discontinued.

This causes trouble for officers who then have to describe a plate to dispatchers during a traffic stop or, even worse, a chase.

“They do not provide any email copy to us or show us what some of these newly designed plates are and which ones no longer exist,” said Sgt. Chad Hill, spokesman for the sheriff’s department. The number of plates “has made it somewhat difficult for law enforcement, and it’s become stressful for officers.”

Other problems stem from the plates’ similarities.

The current blue state plate – with the Indiana torch – is similar to the blue “In God We Trust” plate, which is being phased out but is still on the road. Police say witnesses constantly confuse the two.

Plus, the old “In God We Trust” plate numbers are prefixed by two small letters, which are nearly unidentifiable at a distance for some people.

“That’s a common theme among eyewitnesses and vehicle suspects,” said officer Raquel Foster, a spokeswoman for the Fort Wayne Police Department, about those plates. “They’ll always have the numbers, but they’ll never have the two letters.”

Lubsen, the BMV spokesman, said all plates being issued now must have the same-sized logo and lettering. And while Fries and Hill and others said their departments have had problems, other agencies have had few to none.

“It doesn’t give us any problems,” said Sgt. Ron Galaviz, a spokesman for the Indiana State Police’s Fort Wayne post. “We’re used to dealing with them.”

Fries added that the current plates no longer have raised numbers and instead are just painted on. If someone were to burn a car or truck with a current plate, that number would be lost, but an older plate would still be identifiable.

“It’s so vitally important that we have every tool available to do our job,” he said.

“But this is what we’re stuck with. We have to deal with it.”

jeffwiehe@jg.net