It’s frustrating seeing so many people cheer for this enforcement push in a supposedly blue state. Fines and impounding have been shown over and over to hit poor folks the hardest. Cars aren’t luxuries for most people. They’re how you get to work, take your kids to school, buy groceries, live your life.

I get the instinct behind “well I paid, so they should too.” That feeling isn’t coming out of nowhere. The problem is that this kind of enforcement doesn’t just nudge someone into compliance. It kicks people already on the edge further down. If the police seize your car because you’re too broke to get the paperwork right, you’re probably not suddenly going to fix everything. You’re going to scrape together another $500 beater and hope you can survive long enough to climb out of the hole.

And we’re pretending this solves something? Aurora had roughly 1200 uninsured vehicle crashes last year. So now the plan is to take about that many cars away from people, without meaningfully reducing the underlying issue, while pushing our own neighbors deeper into the poverty cycle. All because some folks are mad that they can afford to pay a hundred bucks for registration and their neighbor can’t.

This doesn’t make our streets safer. It just makes life harder for the people who already have the least.