Motorists love personal plates

LOS ANGELES – The police might never have arr ested Anthony Gordon for a motel robbery here if he had not ordered personalized liceme plates for his Corvette. They said: “IM EVIL.” A bystander at the robbery easily remembered the le~ters. Police quickly found Gordon’s car, the engine still warm. He became just one more victim of California’s great obsession, the personalized plate, an inadvertent aid to law enforcement, topic for sociologists and literary pastime for millions of summer vacationers traveling the highways. From JUEZA S h for female ud e on U.S. u reme o us c es1 e a n- ‘if s 1a Onu:=._~onaw1 o aa n omca’s illmd Corp., personalized plates have swept the Southwest, becoming one of the most visible signs of westerners’ unusual feelin~ about their automc>- biles and themselves. Every state now offers personalized plates to motorists who will pay an extra fee, but California has the greatest number and apparently the highest percentage by far. Tlrough June, California had issued 916,432 personalized plates, enough for nearly 7 per- , cent of the 13.2 million passenger cars in the state. The personalized plates have brought in several million dollars for a special state fund for anti-pollution and park projects, hence the term “environmental plates” for the personalized licenses here. They also forced the state motor vehicles department to install a complicated, computerized screening of objectionable plates. Officer Emanuel Padilla, a spokesman for the California