With the push of a button, these covers hide the license plate, which makes it hard for police to track down vehicles involved in illegal activity. San Francisco is now cracking down on retailers ...

Chiu said he had never heard of the license-plate-covering devices until San Francisco’s police chief, Bill Scott, mentioned his frustration with them at a public safety meeting in June.

Typically, the covers are rolled up in a special license plate frame, and are lowered and raised when the driver pushes a button. They sell for $100 or more, or for as little as $15. Sanchez ...

Automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs, have been part of law enforcement’s toolkit for well over a decade. However, the technology has evolved rapidly in the past couple of years, radically ...

Last month the I-Team spotted a black SUV parked outside the NYPD 103rd Precinct in Queens with the illegal covers obscuring both front and rear license plates. On the dashboard, a makeshift ...