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A Politically Incorrect Reflection on Traffic Stops
I’m no longer a police officer so you’re all safe from me.
Warning: My sarcasm filter is rather low. Do not take it personally. There were many different encounters with people that helped to hone my sense of the absurd, my sense of humor, and my sense of wonder. I cannot thank them enough.
I’ve made a list of the things I have experienced as a police officer on traffic stops, with the exception of the body in the trunk. That happened to an officer that I knew. For those of you that think I’m too acerbic you can take some comfort from the fact that I’m no longer on the road as a police officer.
I had no problem with a private citizen obtaining a concealed handgun permit. I had no problem with said citizen having the handgun in their vehicle. I believe that you have the right to defend yourself. As a police officer I assumed everyone that I approached and talked with was armed.
When I was on a traffic stop my preference was as soon as I got to the driver’s window I was told; “I have a concealed hand gun license” and then I was told where the gun was in the vehicle. Do not display the pistol and then say to me; “It’s okay, I have a permit.” I am going to ask to see the permit. Remember, I did not ask you to show me the pistol. I’m a literal person.
Even though I checked your license plate with a dispatcher I have no idea if you are the RO (Registered Owner) of the vehicle until I see your ID. All I know at that point is your license plate matches the make and model of the vehicle I pulled-over. If the plate does not match the make and model Officer Friendly (that’s me) will start our discussion by asking you to explain why your plate does not match the vehicle.
I have no idea what type of person you are. For all I know you just cleaned your garage, to include the body that had been in there for two days, that is now in your trunk. (this happened to an officer I know on a traffic stop.) I’m not going to call your sixth grade teacher, former Scoutmaster, priest, minister, or rabbi for a character reference, or to find out if you’re kind to small animals and children.
When I ask for your license, registration, and proof of insurance please do not reach into your glove box and try to hand me a stack of paperwork as thick as War and Peace. I’ll let you sort through the paperwork. This keeps your hands busy and allows me to watch you and scan the interior of your car.
If you don’t have your ID and decide to give me someone else’s name pick someone who does not have a warrant for their arrest. If you do have your ID and the dispatcher tells me you have a warrant I’m probably not going to buy into the story that you have an evil twin.
If you’re under 21 you might want to separate your falsified license from your real license. I know it’s not fair that you have to wait until you’re 21 to go night clubbing, but you now have a traffic violation and a criminal charge, and no you don’t get to keep the falsified license.
Please no tears. I’ve seen my share of intended and unintended mayhem. I’ve dealt with people who have lost family members to violence and accidents. I empathize with their tears.
I received my first traffic citation two weeks after I received my license so I’ve been in your position and I muddled through the incident without having to see a therapist.
You can tell me that you believe some traffic laws are ridiculous and should not be enforced, especially the one I stopped you for violating. I already know that, that’s how we met.
Important Tip: You can swear at me all you like, I’m not going to hit you. I am going to write down every expletive, without asterisks on the back of the judge’s copy of your citation. The judge also has a copy of your DMV history in front of him when you go to court. Do not tell the judge you have a perfect driving record unless you do. If you have collected 15 moving violations in 3 months the judge will be led to believe you have two problems. The first is your credibility and the second is you are a slow learner.
I did not write the traffic laws nor assign the amount of the fine for a traffic violation. Your elected representatives do those things. Talk to your representative.
I do not like red light cameras or photo radar vans any more than you do. Once again these are legislative issues. Talk to your city council member, or state legislator.
I abhor city council meetings. Most city council members are to the left of Bernie Sanders. I avoid them whether in a public setting or in a private setting.
If you do decide to go to a city council meeting be prepared to sit and listen before your turn comes to address the council; to a member of The Friends of Trees; to a 35 year-old skater complain that the your city isn’t building enough skate parks; or the bicyclist that has run every red light in the city and who has displayed the impudent digit to every driver that had a green light and almost hit him. His complaint, there aren’t enough bike lanes in the city, which he has no intention of using even if they were provided.
Be careful out there.
Published in Policing
When I was about 10 – 12 years old we lived in a house that had a lot of speed enforcement in our front yard. We supplied lots of lemonade and cookies to the police officers doing so.
Our street ran parallel to the main highway between the spaceport at Cape Canaveral and the bars of Cocoa Beach. On Friday afternoons many workers from the Cape would speed along our street on their way to the bars. In hindsight, the speed limit on our street was probably too low for the type of street it was, but since there was a lot of pedestrian traffic crossing the street to get to the beach, the low speed limit was not completely unreasonable.
They had radar enforcement and non-radar enforcement.
For non-radar enforcement, the police would either wait in a grove of trees about a mile up the street until a car drove by at a clearly excessive speed, then pull out and chase the car down. Generally, by the time the police caught up with the speeder and the speeder pulled over, they were in front of our house. Speeding was so prevalent, there would be three or four police cars lined up in the grove of trees at a time. I’d sometimes take my bike up there and visit with them while they watched for speeders. That was close to a “speed trap,” though I always thought word should have spread among the workers at the Cape to watch out passing that particular grove of trees. I guess the guys were in too much of a hurry to get to the bar.
For radar enforcement, they’d set up the radar gun in our front yard, and place a warning sign a couple of blocks up the street. Speeders would get flagged down to stop just past our yard. As I kid I thought it funny to watch the speeds shown on the radar equipment suddenly drop when the speeder’s car passed the warning sign. I also enjoyed studying to cool police cars.
I have noted in other threads, I found amusing watching drivers change their driving behavior around me during the years I drove a retired police car (still had the black not chrome grill, the spotlight through the driver’s side A pillar, and the black steel wheels).
I’m definitely on board with being courteous to officers, and you can’t blame them for idiot laws your neighbors voted for. That being said, the notion of apologizing to a police officer for breaking the speed limit should be very distasteful to any American adult. (Someone above recommended it, but this is not directed at them.)
As has been said, the officer didn’t write the law. The laws aren’t there to keep us from offending law enforcement. If we’re going to apologize to someone, we should apologize to everyone who lives in or drives through that community. The law is meant to protect them. They’re the ones we’ve (theoretically) endangered.
I got an unsatisfying response when I pointed this very point out to the chief of police in our low crime suburb when they first got license plate reading equipment and started cruising the shopping center parking lots looking for expired registrations and immediately impounding the cars they found. Fortunately, once the novelty of their new toy wore off they seemed to tone down their activity. But it bothered me that the chief of police did not seem to be concerned about how the excessive enforcement might impact civilian perceptions of the police.
I apologize—reflexively, really—because I feel I should know better. The cop is the only representative of the community I’ve got right in front of me at that moment, so he has to hear it. “I’m an idiot. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m sorry.”
Yes, I have a get out of jail free card, but I don’t use it when I’m stopped for speeding. I wait until the ticket is in my hand (or warning, or whatever) before telling the officer that I’m the widow of a police officer. Sometimes they try to get it back from me, but the thing is: my husband died turning to go after a speeding car. The lesson can be so much worse than a mere fine.
Then we chat a bit. Of course, nowadays I probably taught him in the Academy, so he recognizes me. And then I really apologize.
I figured you weren’t, but I couldn’t resist a comment. It doesn’t matter anyway. I hope the officer let you go with a warning instead of a citation.
It seems to me, a new resident of Texas, that speed limit changes are frequent on through roads, and I understand subject to actual enforcement, thus requiring diligent observation of roadside speed limit signs. On the other hand, the speed limits seem rational, unlike in my prior residence in New York in which speed limits were generally unreasonably low, and thus whether you were stopped and ticketed depended much more on the mood of the officer.
There is a live debate going on in the courts about whether a concealed carry permit is justification for the police to conduct a search. People who don’t know the statistics (including the judges who have authorized the practice) persist in erroneous belief that concealed carry permit holders are inherently dangerous people. And yes, the police are looking for guns.
The problem with the apology situation is this one: there are bad cops out there. If you think the guy or gal you are dealing with is a bad cop, it is a good idea to apologize. Any thing else will only bring forth that person’s neuroses or psychoses.
The fact that they may be in the wrong and you may be right is not worth the hassle that it entails.
Even in neutral situations, while dealing with police who are doing some assigned duty, it is best to be thankful, without necessarily making any apologies.
While in my late teens, I watched my first boyfriend and his best friend deal with police for a two year period. Best friend J. was from the South and was extremely polite. He often got off with warnings.
Boyfriend G. was headstrong and from Chicago. During Mardi Gras, 1970, he thought that police should be put in their place. So he argued with police who wanted a park in New Orleans cleaned up of young people, who were simply sitting on blankets soaking up the sun.
G claimed the Constitution protected his right to sit in the park. Well, I supposed it did. But J and I moved off the grass. While we moved away, J stopped to thank the police for their informing us that we were loitering. Then we both began to head to a neighboring bar.
We never made it to the bar, as we ended up watching the cops put G under arrest. G was able to spend an informative few hours in jail, writing a screed he thought was equal to Hemmingway, while we figured out how to arrange for his bail.
Those were hours of my life I never got back. But while G claimed J and I were sell outs, I thought our approach was mature. On the plus side, I learned thru several other experiences like this what qualities I should expect of future boyfriends. Arguing with police was not one of them.
If they want to write tickets for revenue generation, they should skip speeding and concentrate on things that are actually dangerous, like running red lights. The opportunities are equally as numerous (you could easily write 2 or 3 tickets on every cycle of the lights around here) and in time might actually improve traffic safety.
When my brother was on APD he had a home car (marked squad that was his 24×7, that they were encouraged to use around town even when off duty. He just couldn’t take it out of the city.).
He said the biggest problem was that he his defensive driving skills started getting weaker on those occasions when he was driving his own car, because he got so used to how carefully people drove around a marked squad.
Yeah, human beings should never go to New Orleans. It is a cess pool of corruption, especially among the police.
I was there in 1986 with a few friends, not during Mardi Gras (I wasn’t that stupid, even that young). I was designated driver and my friends were drinking, one was fine, and the other I had to hold by the arm to keep him going in a generally straight line. While thus walking down the street, bothering no one, a cop came along and did a flying tackle. Both the cop and my friend went airborne and slammed into a taxi that was navigating through the pedestrian clogged street. Bystanders were coming to me unsolicited, pressing business cards in my hand and offering to fly back from Michigan whenever there would be a trial.
My cousin lived nearby and worked at Mercy Hospital (?) and explained that “if you buy a gun, they’ll give you a badge.”
My friend got hauled off to jail and the other two of us spent the night trying to find him. Eventually we found him when they released him. They had broken his neck and didn’t want to deal with that, so they let him go. At the eventual trial, the prosecutor agreed to drop the charges as long as he didn’t sue them. He didn’t want a drinking incident to blight his military career, so he took the deal. I wouldn’t have.
Yeah, I don’t trust cops to be paragons of virtue. I only hope they are somewhat restrained at best. I have no such expectations of that in the “chocolate city.”
When I say you shouldn’t apologize, I’m not saying you’ve nothing to apologize for. What I’m saying is that the police officer isn’t the person to whom to apologize (unless, of course, you did something reckless that put him, personally, in danger).
I guess I have a thing about inappropriate apologies. There’s something servile about apologizing to the police for breaking the law. Perhaps I’m not sure how to express it.
In some religious circles, they translate the name of God given in the Old Testament, Jehovah, as “I am.” (Yes, I know the longer more literal translation.) So, that commandment about not taking the Lord’s name in vain, that means be very careful that you assign your “I am” to Godly properties and not to bad things. “Sorry” is not a Godly property, so linking it to “I am” is breaking one of the Ten Commandments. (Yes, I know that this is not the standard view. I might have been told that before. Thank you.) From people who believe this, you might get an, “I apologize,” but never an “I’m sorry.”
For instance one might say, “I apologize that my actions are taking your time, officer.”
Ah. Yes. New Orleans in the 1980s was pretty notorious. I know, because my late husband was choosing which departments he’d like to apply to. His criteria were as follows: the department had to be in a place (city, state, region) that his fretful, pregnant wife could imagine herself living…and the department could not be corrupt. This narrowed down the choices more in those days than they would today, but New Orleans was definitely off the list. (Also, the wife doesn’t like the heat).
There were departments in New Jersey that had actual drug gangs working out of the precinct houses. Really bad. For what it’s worth, it’s improved a lot over the past thirty years(EDIT: nationwide, that is) —better selection process, better training, better equipment and—my particular area of interest—better education around the management of stress.
One reason I’d offer for being polite, telling the truth and being apologetic is that you don’t know where the officer has come from. You don’t know whether he’s been hanging out doing reports at the station…or has just responded to a crib death, a screaming domestic or a fatal car accident. “I’m sorry” may be covering a lot more than you realize.
Yea, but don’t point that out to them. I can read a bumper sticker just as well as the next person.
Also, it’s not going to get you out of a DWI.
And bear in mind that Brian was driving a car licensed to me, not him. I think the search was justified.
Happened to me twice. Oddly enough, criminals who conceal identity tend to steal from other low-lifes.
Also happened to me more than once.
Also don’t:
* Glue your picture over the picture of the real person the license belongs to.
* Forget the address, date of birth or name on the fake license.
* Use your date of birth with just the year changed when your birthday is February 29.
Nope. Not even close. They were thugs.
Or at least make it multiples of four.
Except it’s a lot harder to look like a 21-year-old when you’re 17 than when you’re 20.
Yeah, but 20 to 24 is not as much of a stretch.
I’ve only been stopped a few times in the 65 years of driving, mostly for something wrong or out of place with the vehicle. Only one speeding ticket. Once while driving my mother’s van, she hadn’t renewed reg in years, and once received a fix it ticket. I worked for the LA County Sheriff’s dept at the time, gave the officer my I.D. with my license. He laughed and said, “I know you are one of us and all, but that is my supervisor in the car with me.”
The most humorous, leaving a freeway on an off ramp, I was bending down fiddling with the radio and had wobbled a little over the line and the HP pulled me over. This is 10 p.m., no traffic, but he stopped me anyway. Started asking me questions: do you have any condition that would impeded you walking in a straight line? Yes. Questions kept coming and I answered yes or no to all until he asked if I could count backwards from 100, and I burst out laughing. Told him I was an accountant and hadn’t counted backwards since I learned to use a calculator. Since I was only a few blocks from home, he asked if I could make it home okay. Told him, of course, especially if he followed me. He did follow me, and waved good-by when I pulled into my drive.
You believe these idiots can think that far ahead?
I despise corruption.
I would have. But then, I wouldn’t have been doing something like fake IDs or drinking.
It’s not corruption. It’s just good sense.
I wasn’t corruption, it was for a fix it ticket, and I had just sold the car, had the paper work, and was driving it to the new owner. It meant I had to pay for the fix instead of the new owner.
Right. It wasn’t corrupt because he cited you. But he implied that he wanted to be corrupt.
You have a strange way of looking at things. Are all the police officers quoted on this board “corrupt” because they let somebody go without a ticket?