THE wife says I'm becoming obsessed with those real life crime shows on Freeview.

And it's true that I do view the world through the lens of a police camera more than I really should.

That's a camera mounted inside a patrol car manned by officers who spend so much time on telly they are required to be members of Equity as well as the Police Federation.

I only mention this alleged obsession of mine because it is about to turn me into a supergrass.

Well, a grass at any rate.

On a recent edition of one of the programmes – Police! Crash! Bang! Wallop! or suchlike – we learned that tinkering with car registration plates is a serious offence.

Officers stopped a vehicle whose owner had used black tape to make the letter 0 on the registration plate appear to be the figure 8.

This is a wheeze much favoured by crooks who fill up at petrol stations and drive away without paying. The registration number is caught on CCTV all right, but it's fake.

Stone me if I didn't personally witness an almost identical infringement while travelling to work on the bus last week.

Let us say the vehicle was a BMW 4x4, because that's what it was, and that it had the personalised number plate SPOON, which it didn't, although it did have something similar.

The intended word did have two 0s in the middle, but while waiting for the traffic to get moving I focused on these and realised that one was not an 0, but a doctored figure 8.

Part of the figure 8 had been painted over in white to make it resemble the letter O and therefore complete the word SPOON.

This is wholly illegal, of course, and I marvelled at the arrogance and stupidity of someone willing to break the law to personalise the number plate on their car.

If we all did it, they might as well bin the computer that records vehicle registrations and helps the police fight car crime.

A personalised plate is a childish affectation that says a lot about the owner of a car, but it's a free country and there's no law against buying a plate that appears to form a word, no matter how meaningless.

But doctoring plates out of sheer vanity is clearly unacceptable, and I'm now in the invidious position of having to shop a fellow citizen to the constabulary.

Will my friends in the Bag o' Nails at Normacot take a dim view of my turning stool pigeon? Will I be shunned by the city's Runyonesque element?

And what if I blab to the boys in blue only to learn the white paint was not white paint but the calling card of a passing pigeon?

After a great deal of soul-searching and canvassing of opinion, I have decided to give the owner of the BMW time to reflect.

They will have 48 hours from the publication of this article to restore the registration plate to its un-retouched state or prepare to face the full might of the law.

I seek no reward or recognition of my exemplary public spiritedness, by the way, although if the Chief Constable saw fit to present me with a medal or framed certificate it would be ill-mannered in the extreme to decline the honour.