Alternatively the police could look up all 4 plates to see which are actually registered, which are on cars that reasonably match other details from the witnesses and forensic evidence from the scene, and talk to the owners of any of the cars that haven't been elimanted. If that fails they could expand the search to other logic permutations of plates. They could even call this process "police work".
This question isn't designed to test how well applicants can master the real world skill of researching license plates. It's designed to see if applicants realize that generally speaking, witness recollections are faulty, but that fact can be mitigated by piecing together a composite based on multiple recollections.
Also, uniformed officers disproportionately come from uniformed officer families. One way they can give their kin a structural advantage is to design the tests to have certain recurring types of logical problems which can be relentlessly practiced. So, year after year, you'll see the same kinds of exam questions, with the details switched around. That license question or a close logical variant may have been on the test for generations.
Right, but looking at those answers there is one plate you'd try first.
I don't know how plates work in the US but in the UK quite often you'll find similar cars with similar plates because they were registered at the dealer in a block. A great example is how about 14 years ago nearly all the police cars in Scotland were silver Ford Focuses with plates that started "SF58" and then had more-or-less sequential runs of three letters. "SF" means it was registered in Edinburgh, "58" means September 2008, and the three letter group is serially assigned. Of course, this applied to all their *unmarked* cars, too...
Plates work very differently on older cars in the US because a car gets a new plate whenever it changes owners or the owner moves from one state to another.
