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Fact Check

Tag Scheme
There is no universal identifier that applies
to the license plates of all law enforcement
vehicles.

By Kim LaCapria

Published Aug 24, 2015

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FACT CHECK:    Do all police cars (marked

and unmarked) have "L" as the final letter of
their license plates?

Claim:     All police cars (marked and

unmarked) have "L" as the final letter of their
license plates.

FALSE
   

Example:   [Collected via e-mail and Twitter,

August 2015]

All cops have an L at the end of their

license plate

PSA: all cop cars have an L as the

last letter of there license plate,
including undercovers. You're
welcome
pic.twitter.com/ziVuHg6WUk

— WORLD STAR FANS

(@WorldStarFunny) August 3,
2015

Origins:   In August 2015, the tweet

embedded above started (or restarted) a
rumor about police car license plates.
According to the rumor, all police vehicles
(be they marked or unmarked units) bear the
letter "L" as their final characters.

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The precise origin of the claim isn't clear

(and it didn't appear to be widely circulated
prior to August 2015), but a 2010
discussion on a forum for law enforcement
officers about jurisdiction-specific license
plates for police vehicles featured numerous
assertions about patterns (or lack thereof)
within any given police force. For example, a
forum member from Virginia stated:

Marked units [in Virgnia] have an L on

the plate for city and county
governments. State police have there
[sic] own plate, and other state
agencies will have an S. Some
unmarked units used in Virginia Beach
will have an L plate, some will have
regular plates. It all depends on the
use. The unmarked unit that I will pull
when working traffic assignments has
normal state plates, but you would
know it is a unit by the extremely dark
tinted windows and three antennas on
the trunk.

A member from Wisconsin added:

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Around here marked cars have

"OFFICIAL" plates (tan with a star) and
unmarked units (regardless of use) bear
standard civilian plates.

An Iowan weighed in, too:

Marked municipal police cars have a

governmental plate with 4, 5 , 6 or 7
black numbers on a white background.
Marked County Sheriff cars have a
white background with S-(officer badge
number) Marked State Patrol have a 2-
3 digit number indicating the Troopers
badge number DOT enforcement have
a T-(badge number) plate DNR Law
Enforcement have a C-(badge number
(C=Conservation)

A simple Google Image search strongly

contradicts the rumor's claims as well:
results reveal an array of tag styles in a large
number of jurisdictions, with seemingly little
pattern to them (and few with "L" as the final
letter):

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Aside from a rumor made popular in a single

tweet that circulated in August 2015,
nowhere were we able to substantiate the
belief that all police license plates end in the
letter "L." Extant images on the web suggest
that the claim is false, and previous online
forum conversations (unrelated to the rumor
or any variants) suggest that few (if any)
commonalities occurred between
jurisdictions with respect to law enforcement
license plate character patterns.

We contacted police in Nassau County to

determine whether officers there could
corroborate the claim, and the officer with
whom we spoke said the rumor was "not at
all" true for squad cars.

Users on social media sites engage in

recurring discussions about ways by which
to identify unmarked police cars,
conversations that rarely culminate in any
hard-and-fast rules about what all law
enforcement vehicles may have in common.
Moreover, police practices (and how to
outwit them) is a common theme in many
urban legends.

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By Kim LaCapria

Kim LaCapria is a former writer for Snopes.

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Article Tags
law enforcement

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