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January 29, 2013 at 4:44 pm #606369
amaliaParticipantI can’t find a link I used to have that allowed you to look up a license plate and see the make and year of the vehicle. It’s somewhere on the Seattle.gov site. Anyone know where?
Thanks!
January 29, 2013 at 5:05 pm #783726
SueParticipantI found this on a thread on the myballard site: http://web1.seattle.gov/courts/cpi/VehicleList.aspx?
Didn’t know that even existed. I did search for my own plate, and noticed it said it was in Washington, that it was a Mazda, and the correct color, but had no year or model number listed.
January 29, 2013 at 5:23 pm #783727
amaliaParticipantThanks, Sue, that’s it. All my “controls” have yielded at least car make. Plates of a driver that threatened and harrassed me did not yield any information, and I expected they were stolen.
I’m wondering if absence of information = stolen or fake plates. If people want to check for their own plates, I would be interested to know if any legitimate plates come up empty.
January 29, 2013 at 6:11 pm #783728
biankatParticipantEntered one of our cars’ plate numbers and it came back blank.
January 29, 2013 at 6:32 pm #783729
miwsParticipantJanuary 29, 2013 at 6:35 pm #783730
biankatParticipantah – I thought the OP was talking about a generic plate search page. Good to know I’m clean :)
January 29, 2013 at 7:01 pm #783731
amaliaParticipantMike, are you sure that’s true? My greatest violation is a parking ticket, and my plate came up.
January 29, 2013 at 7:02 pm #783732
SueParticipantMy plate came up also, and I have had no violations that anybody’s ever told me about.
January 29, 2013 at 7:19 pm #783733
KimberleyParticipantMy old plate came up. It had six entries, in one of the entries it had “6” as the year, which since the old car was a 2006, makes sense. It also listed make/model/colour. I searched an old plate in a different state, it listed the vehicle three times, correct make, under model it stated “4 door” (which it was), no year and correct colour.
January 29, 2013 at 7:24 pm #783734
miwsParticipantInteresting.
I always thought there had to be a violation associated to the plate, even as relatively minor as parking ticket.
Looks like I stand corrected. :-)
Mike
January 29, 2013 at 7:52 pm #783735
JustSarahParticipantNeither my current plate, nor the other active plate I know by heart (my mom’s) bring up anything. Neither have associated violations.
The plate on my first car and on my husband’s old car both have entries, and both would have had associated violations.
Also, I don’t get anything when searching for my scooter’s plate, and have no violations on there.
Plural of anecdote is not data, but so far my testing jibes with what MIWS said.
January 29, 2013 at 8:40 pm #783736
B-squaredParticipantWhat a strange site. I ran my previous plate, the one that was stolen and which had racked up a bunch of parking tickets after it was stolen, and it had three entries, each with no data in them. I also entered my current plate which came up, but with no data (as expected).
I’m a little surprised the stolen plate didn’t come back as “stolen” or something of the sort.
January 29, 2013 at 9:53 pm #783737
amaliaParticipantWell, that’s just not very useful at all, then. Many thanks to you all for testing it.
January 29, 2013 at 10:28 pm #783738
sbreParticipantWhen I enterd my plates three entries came up, all old.
My current car was not to be found.
January 29, 2013 at 10:59 pm #783739
cjboffoliParticipantIt was interesting to find a violation attributed to my license plate for a place I had never parked. Since the plate, make and color match and this is close to a car dealership where my car has been frequently serviced I’m guessing the dealer must have parked my car on the street somewhere and paid the ticket without telling me.
January 29, 2013 at 11:39 pm #783740
amaliaParticipantYou actually found information about a violation using that site?
January 30, 2013 at 1:58 am #783741
waterworldParticipantThe site most of you are looking at and discussing is a search page on the Seattle Municipal Court Public Information website. Another way to get to the same search page is to go to the Muni Court Public Information at this address —
web1.seattle.gov/courts/cpi/
and select “Vehicle” from the menu on the left side of the page. If you enter a plate number and state (it defaults to Washington), and you do not get any hits, that tells you the City has no records of any criminal cases or citations involving the car license number.
If you do get hits, they will relate to specific cases or citation records. To see these records, first click on the plate number in the list. That launches a “Details” page for that listing for the plate number. On the Details page, below the vehicle details, you should see two tabs, one that says “Cases,” and one that says “Citations.” The page will open on the “Cases” screen. “Cases” refers to criminal cases. For many if not most of you, it will say “No records to display.” If you click on the “Citations” tab, you will get a link to the records for the citation(s) (parking ticket or driving infraction) associated with that entry.
There should be an entry under one of these two tabs if you found your license plate on this search page. If you got to this page and didn’t see an entry, it’s probably because you didn’t click over to the “Citations” tab.
I don’t know how far back the database goes, but I found a record for a parking ticket I got back in 2007, so it goes at least that far.
The OP was looking for a site the provided the make and year associated with any license plate. I’m not aware of any such site connected with the City of Seattle. The Washington State Patrol and the Washington Department of Licensing would have that information, but I don’t know that you can readily get it (for people other than yourself, that is). Federal law prohibits public disclosure of any personal identifying information that’s associated with a vehicle license (with some exceptions that I don’t think apply here). Since the State cannot disclose personal identifying information connected with a car license, I’m not sure it would make sense to have a searchable database the was restricted to matching license plates only to the make and year of the car.
January 30, 2013 at 2:33 pm #783742
B-squaredParticipantThanks for the clarification, WW. I went back to the site and had missed the tab for “Citation”. All my tickets did show up, but i was still surprised that my previous plate didn’t have some kind of indication that it had been stolen – i presume it’s still out there being used on the look-alike car.
January 30, 2013 at 3:25 pm #783743
KimberleyParticipantAfter Christopher’s post I went back and figured out that if you clicked on the plate number it took you to the section with the citations information. I was able to see that the prior owner of my previous vehicle had many parking tickets and was likely a WS Seattle resident.
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