MEMPHIS, Tenn. — If the city were to return to car inspections, would that solve the problem of counterfeit temporary tags and uninsured drivers on Memphis streets?

It was a topic of conversation this week between the city’s police chief and a city councilman.

Shelby County stopped vehicle inspections back in 2013, after the city stopped funding the program.

Since then, there has been a proliferation of drive-out tags on cars, and police say many of them could be fake.

That led Councilman Jeff Warren to ask Chief C.J. Davis if there was anything the city could do to curb the problem.

“On those paper tags, is there something we can do as a council to try to see what we can do to make them illegal or to make some other system that is more accountable?” he asked Davis.

Davis replied that counterfeit tags are usually easy to spot, and officers do pull over drivers for having them, “but it goes back to the conversation that we’ve had here in the past about inspections on vehicles.”

“When we don’t have the inspections, people feel like they don’t have to have insurance, or a tag,” she said. “It creates an environment of unsafe vehicles on our roads.”

The lack of inspections also leads to unsafe cars that may be missing bumpers, for instance.

Warren asked if the city should be going back to doing inspections for safety.

“There’s a lot of discussions about that and how the fact that we don’t have inspections creates all of these other problems,” Davis said. “It helps to regulate vehicles when we have inspections.  It helps people to know that in order to drive your car you have to have a legitimate tag, a legitimate insurance.  And many of our vehicles are on the roads now because those individuals that are riding around with counterfeit tags don’t have insurance. And so when they’re in accidents, it creates an undue burden on the person that they were in the accident with.”

County Mayor Lee Harris recently told commissioners that the number of registered vehicles on local roads had dropped by 100,000 — 17% — in the past year.

“Right now there are just under 600K vehicles in Shelby County, which is about a 100k drop from 12 months ago, and we need to make up that revenue this budget cycle,” Mayor Harris said.