By Lewis Diuguid, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist

No good deed ever seems to go unpunished.

That cliché seemed to fit with an experience I had in the parking garage at the Metropolitan Community College – Penn Valley. I had spent a week at the college helping to teach the ins and outs of journalism to eager high school and college students.

These students want careers in the newspaper and broadcast industries and are enrolled in the Urban Student Journalism Academy, which the Kansas City Association of Black Journalists has sponsored since 1982.

Every day I parked in the dark, covered garage and hauled books, cameras and other supplies to the third floor of the humanities building.
One day I noticed the stickers on my license plates had been carefully scraped off.

Not again! The same thing had happened two years earlier in the same garage when I was helping to teach in the same program.

As times get tougher, desperate people will do desperate things. I learned from the first theft to take a razor blade to score the sticker so that if anyone tried to steal the new one, it would come off in pieces and be unusable.

But people intent on crime always find a way around the best efforts to thwart them. It just takes them a bit more time to do their dirty work.

I could only imagine that my perpetrator carefully removed the pieces of the sticker with a razor blade and then reassembled the mess for his own use. Someone told me that thieves have a new system to make these thefts quick and easy. I don’t doubt it.

To get a vehicle licensed in Missouri, people have to show proof that they have paid their property taxes, gotten a vehicle inspection and have automobile insurance.

Without that proof, and the money for the licensing tags, they could be rolling on our roads illegal.

The cost of gasoline is nearly prohibitive for a lot of people. Add to that insurance, taxes and repairs, and some people in a pinch for transportation may become creative thieves going after easy marks like me.

Such thefts are horribly inconvenient. I rode my bicycle with the paperwork for my van to the state office building downtown. I stood in line and paid about $4 to replace the two stickers.

I told the attendant what had happened and asked whether I had done something wrong in trying to protect the stickers.

She said there was no ironclad way to keep from being a victim. The best insurance, however, is to invest in license plate covers.
The crime caused me to follow her advice.

Apparently other people have gotten the same message. I went to an auto parts store at 63rd Street and the Paseo and found only one clear license plate cover left on the shelf.

I bought it and picked up a tinted one for the front. Tinted never suits my fancy. However, theft prevention does.

I bolted the new license plate covers on, making sure to put the new stickers on first. It’s not a foolproof way to keep from being victimized again.

But for now the thieves know that getting to my tags will take a little longer. That is the most protection that any of us can hope for in these desperate times.

Lewis W. Diuguid is a member of The Star’s Editorial Board. To reach him, call (816) 234-4723 or send e-mail to