Anti-Muslim slur has state keeping close tabs on license plates

Minnesota's Department of Public Safety is reviewing its process for approving personalized license plates. The department began the review last week, after someone in central Minnesota spotted a plate offensive to Muslims and posted a photo on social media.

Most states have a stringent vetting process for so-called vanity plates and strict rules about what's allowed and what's not. Minnesota law does not offer a list of forbidden words or word fragments. But the law does say no customized combination of characters may be of an obscene, indecent or immoral nature.

That means it's up to the Department of Public Safety, which handles vehicle registrations, to make sure nothing blue, or worse, makes it to the Rush City prison where Minnesota's plates are printed. Gov. Mark Dayton said the department is investigating how the anti-Muslim plate slipped by.

"An individual had to request it," he said. "It was up in Foley, Minn. Somebody there approved it. And what was going through their mind, I can't say. And that's why we need this other layer of review in the central office to make sure that each one of these is looked at every which way."

No one has been fired over the anti-Muslim license plate, Dayton said, but the state did revoke it.

The Department of Public Safety would not make anyone available to talk about the investigation or the criteria the agency uses to review Minnesota's nearly 99,000 personalized plates.

Keeping tabs on offensive license plates is a challenge for motor vehicle departments across the country — and a hobby of sorts for others.

A few years ago, Nick Steffel of Minneapolis got involved with a project through the website muckrock.com, which crowd-sources open records requests. Steffel and several others asked for states' lists of rejected vanity plates. They found that Minnesota doesn't keep such a list. Many other states gave them the runaround.

The lists they did obtain, Steffel said, show what some drivers tried to sneak past the censors.

"Drug references, alcohol references, racial language, curse words, things like that," he said. "Some of them were people who were trying to impersonate — like they would try to request a plate that said FBI or something like that, which obviously they turned down."

In Wisconsin, the list of 8,457 banned plates includes all the words you can't say on the radio, variations thereof, and associated acronyms. Letters and numbers preceding and following F appear to be drawing special scrutiny.

The initials of the former Wisconsin Tourism Federation are not allowed on Badger State plates. Though it should be noted that the agency has been known as the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin since 2009, when officials got wind of recent changes in the vernacular.

Keeping up with those changes is tricky, says Dick Yourga, of Amherst, Mass. He's a lifelong license plate buff and vice president of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association. He has thousands of plates, and follows news about controversial ones.

Yourga said plate censorship today requires more than just a basic backward and forward reading of the requested phrases. Motor vehicle departments must now keep an eye out for dirty words that aren't in English.

"Because this is a pluralistic society, they had to add in all kinds of languages because they wanted to keep out offensive phrases in any language," Yourga said.