I was going down the highway the other day, five over as usual. Don’t know why that makes a difference to me, but I always go slightly above the speed limit. Anyway…
This cop just goes flying past me. No lights on, no emergency, he is just flying down the highway. My first thoughts went something like, “oh man, I hope I’m only doing five over.” After a minute, though, my next and final thought came to me, “I’m going five over, and he is going atleast 10mph faster than me, and he is a cop in a cruiser.”
I really, really wanted to chase after him, going all of 15 over, just to see what would happen.
Should the be ticketed? Absoloutly.
Will they get ticketed? Probably not.
Is this unfair? Yep
I’m going to take the less traveled path here and say I don’t care if they get away with things they shouldn’t.
People want their law enforcement to be perefect examples of what is rightious and good. Cops are still people. They like everyone else will help out their freinds and families in ways that are easily availible to them. Not giving someone a ticket is pretty easy to do.
I have a few freinds that are cops and they have to deal with negative crap for tickets they do issue all the time. If they had a choice the woudn’t issue them to anyone. It is their job and they try to do a decent job of it.
People arn’t generaly nice to cops that give them tickets. They issue alot of tickets so get shit from alot of different people.
Unfortunately, yes, but they are supposed to be better than that. We entrust them to enforce the laws on us, and therefore they should be held to a higher standard. Would you trust Jethro down at the gas station to carry a gun and enforce the law?
I know that they will still be only human, but that is why a group such as law-enforcement needs rigorous self-policing, something that is lacking. Only the most egregious violations get punished, and not even then if the corruption is widespread unless it becomes public (Ramparts scandal).
It’s not a matter of wanting them to be perfect so much as it only being fair that they’re held to the same standards as everyone else. Their job function grants them authority, not entitlement to break laws, no matter how seemingly petty and regardless of whether they’re in or out of uniform.
To extend such entitlement to relatives and spouses is even more ridiculous.
As soon as I start writing every ticket for every violation for every driver I pull over, then I will start writing tickets to other cops. If I am ever in trouble and they are passing by I expect them to stop and risk their lives to help me, as I would for them. The least I could do is give them a pass on a minor motor vehicle violation. I give breaks for much lesser reasons. And yes I have received I ticket in the past for going a little over the speed limit (I wouldn’t have pulled me over).
Happened to me, too, on I-5 somewhere in the middle of CA. I was doing, er, well over the speed limit, and in one of the rare moments I wasn’t keeping an eye on my rear view mirror, I spotted a CHP car directly behind me and closing. “Shit,” I thought, “there’s no way I’m getting out of this; I’m caught red-handed.” So I move to the right lane and start slowing and looking for a place to be pulled over, when the CHP just blasts right by me and speeds off into the distance. He must’ve been going at least 90.
How is that comparable? Writing John Q. Public a speeding ticket but letting him slide with not wearing a seat belt isn’t the same as allowing the wife of some guy you don’t even know endanger everyone around her by driving 20 miles over the limit.
Helping you is their duty: protect and serve. They’re sworn to it just as you are, just as a doctor is sworn to put aside their personal bias and give a known murderer the same care they’d give another doctor.
If letting them pass is the least you could do, what’s the most?
That is only reasonable if you let other police officers tickets slide in the same way you would let a civi ticket slide.
Now since police officers probably don’t give you lip or act rudly when you stop one, I’m happy to believe that they are less likely to end up booked. But if you find an officer is a repeat offender and you still don’t book them just because they are a police officer, then you are acting little better than many people who end up in jail for what they chose to do ot not to do.
What if the cop does something that you would never ignore if it were a civilian, maybe run a red light, would you still not book the cop? Is it perhapse because you would be seen as not playing for the team if you were to ticket a cop? If it is, I can understand you not ticketing cops, but I would then hope some sufficiently senior police officers could do what is necessary to stop that false sence of team that allows for the ignoring of such illegal activity.
I guess that police corruption in some places is so bad, that considering the very minor police corruption of favourable reaction to driving offence should not happen because resources should be used in fighting major corruption. None the less it is a form of police corruption.
I have never met a cop who would stop you for going 10 over. Hell, there’s a traffic column in the WaPo and they once quoted a police spokesman saying a ‘10 over’ ticket is pretty rare. Just yesterday I was driving to work, (doing about 10 over the limit) when I saw a cop standing by the side of the road with a radar gun. I gave him a wave, without slowing down, and he just waved back. Maybe it helps that I’m a middle-aged white guy in a late model Subaru wagon, I don’t know.
Cops looking the other way for other cops is a real sore spot with me. Breaking the law (even a minor one) with impunity is not a professional courtesy. It’s just plain corruption.
Once I got a speeding ticket and went to a defensive driving class with about 60 other people. The class was run by a retired cop. We had to go around the room and say what we did wrong. Nearly everyone said speeding. So the guy starts telling us all the reasons why speeding is wrong. His main point is that it’s dangerous. Fair enough. Then someone asks why, if it’s so dangerous, do cruisers blow past me even when I’m speeding, and why do they crawl up my ass when I’m actually doing the speed limit?
Guy smiles a little smirky smile and says, “Cops are the worst offenders with speeding. You’ll never get a cop to do the speed limit.” A few people argued that we shouldn’t have to do the speed limit if officers won’t. The guy just smiled. “They’re cops and you’re not,” he said. And he was right.
I wonder about photo-radar catching cops, and any satistics about the % of cops ticketed via photoradar and the % of cops written up.
Also a big killer is the differential of speed between the general public and the lawbreaking speeding off duty cops - I wonder if they have a disproportional %'age of accidents - even if the accident was rulled not their fault (which I could never believe since cops write the accident report).
You know if a cop got stopped going 10 or so over and was with the flow of traffic then I don’t really have a problem letting them off. However, I see them all the time doing 70-80+ on the highway, no lights, weaving in and out of traffic, stuff like that really pisses me off. I used to live near a substation and would always see cops come to the light, turn on their lights to get through the light, then turn them off and sit at the next light. If they needed to get somewhere then leave the lights on, don’t just go through the one light because it’s a long one. I think this is why a lot of people don’t have a lot of respect for the police, you see them doing stuff like this so why would you?
This is a professional courtesy that is slowly going the way of the dodo. Used to be that cops and their families, doctors, nurses, firemen, EMTs, celebrities and even politicians and judges were given a free pass. But with more and more negative attention being given to this not-so-secret secret, mindsets are starting to change.
With digital recorders and camera phones becoming more prolific, it’s becoming harder and harder for policemen to get away with these cover-ups. Patrick Kennedy’s recent accident comes to mind. Here in Cincinnati, an officer was fired for getting one too many off-duty DUIs. Twenty years ago that would have never happened.
I am more then willing to give them the benifit of the doubt when on duty in a patrol car, since they may be responding code (emergency), but due to traffic conditions it may not be to the cops benefit timewise to always drive w/ lights and siren. Also cops are not suppose to respond code unless it is a ‘true emergency’. If driving normally is ok for the present emergency then they should not turn on their lights, but when there is a stop light it may swing to the side that they have to respond w/ their lights.
Yes I know there is a buttload of abuse going on here, but I can’t tell which is real and which is not.
Also Cops drivign the speedlimit in marked cars cause traffic backups, so they really need to exceed it by enough as not to cause this.
This I understand, but I’ve seen it enough where they will come to a light, one that’s long or hard to make a left turn at. Turn on the lights to get through the light and then wait at the next light. I’ve seen it enough, as in almost every day when I lived near the substation, to question it.
As I said, if they want to keep up with what traffic normally does, and they usually do, which is usually around 65 in the 55 zone then fine. I see them every so often in the HOV lane, where they are not supposed to be in Mayland, do 80+ which I find to be very dangerous. If you need to be moving like that then you need lights.
I’m not saying all cops do crap like that. I’ve seen enough just go with the flow of traffic, but enough bad apples can do a lot of damage.
The thing that gets me about a cop letting another cop off a speeding ticket for “professional courtesy” is that, given the same excuse by a civilian, the reply would be “well, you won’t get there any faster if you’re dead”. I got a speeding ticket once for going ten MPH over the limit, and was treated to a two hour lecture by the judge about how I was endangering others’ lives and could have cost millions in damages both real and liability-wise, and so on and so forth.
But if cops are telling each other it’s no big deal, and wink-wink-nudge-nudge go on your merry way, it only serves to reinforce the idea that cops are dicks, speed laws are meaningless, and it’s all just a power-trip anyway.
PS if it wasn’t abudantly clear. Fuck yes, cops should get speeding tickets. If anything, they should get double the fine because they damn well know better, and (supposedly) spend all their working time protecting us idiot civilians from killing each other and scraping us off the freeways when we don’t mind the rules.