Not quite my first time, but a sorta-similar story from late high school.
I was driving through ordinary middle class 1970s suburbia with one other guy in the car. It’s ~9pm on a weeknight. I’d parallel parked for a probably 3-4 minutes in a downtown area where all the storefronts were long closed for the night. We were rubbernecking at the cars in a car lot but never got out of our car.
I drive away and in a couple blocks I’ve got one police car behind me. Then 3. Then a spotlight from a helo hits us and the whole world lights up with flashing red lights everywhere. We look at each other deer in the headlights style and think “Good thing we’re both white with short hair, but I hope we don’t get shot by accident.”
I pull over, and we’re immediately surrounded by first cars and then policemen. Like 5+ cars and even more policemen. The one guy comes to my window and very curtly asks for license and registration. The tension on his side is palpable. I’m doing my best to be all smiles and lightness.
Eventually they all relaxed and we were released without a citation. Which makes sense since we’d done nothing wrong.
As we were wrapping up I asked the lead officer why the big response. He said that the previous night some dudes had vandalized the crap out of the inventory at that car lot. The car lot’s security camera recording showed a vehicle similar to mine. They had thought we were probably those dudes, back to admire their handiwork or add to it.
Sometimes you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
No, the message actually sent is “you’re either cop, or little people. We treat every person not in group one as a deadly threat, and we will shoot your ass with 50 bullets with the slightest provocation. Even if your “crime” is going 10 over.”
OTOH every time I was pulled over, it was one car. Even at 1:00 am in rural Texas.
How many cops does it take to chase one vehicle? You don’t need 5-10 cop cars in a long congo line to make a vehicle stop. If you car can’t do the job, perhaps they need additional training.
And of the tens of thousands of law enforcement agencies how many is many?
We have DUI special assignment saturation teams. But if a patrolman not on that team or in that sector makes a stop, he deals with it. It doesn’t get passed on. The sat team is used in certain areas where OWI occurrences are high, or on certain dates like specific holidays. But the Officers on that team are no higher trained than any other patrol cop. DUI detection and apprehension is 101 for anyone in a traffic squad.
But like mentioned before, there could be dozens of reasons why multiple squads are present.
Well that only applies if the people stealing the car are complete idiots. Oh wait, people who don’t stop for the police are generally complete idiots!
Still I think we will see drones used in some capacity to just track people trying to evade capture. Even if just to verify where they are at so a roadblock/trap could be set.
Ok. There’s definitely a school of thought that since DUIs are such moneymakers that they get priority and the police make absolutely sure they have all their ducks in a row to guarantee a conviction. The state gets money as well as the associated companies in the DUI industry
If a municipality is using traffic enforcement to raise revenue, using DUI arrests to do it would be idiotic.
First of all, a tag takes at least 2 officers off the road for at least 3 hours for booking, paperwork, and processing. Then there is the extra expenses of overtime for hearings and such. Comparing the amount of revenue brought in the end compared to other violation fines, I do not see the percentage.
Using a laser gun and having a tolerance of 15 over an officer can generate more money in 60 minutes (and still remain on the road to take calls) than one DUI brings in. Theres no mandatory hearings for speeding cites that officers have to attend, and violators rarely take them to trial.
Around here the special DUI cops are normally out at night on weekends.
One time cops were stopping me (and everybody) near the local FB stadium. And it just so happened the very next day the Rolling Stones had a show there.
I want to tell you ‘bout the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where this is happenin’. They got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car, but when we got to the scene of the crime, there was five police officers and three police cars, bein’ the biggest crime of the last fifty years and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it
And they was usin’ up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hangin’ around the Police Officer Station. They was takin’ plaster tire tracks, footprints, dog-smellin’ prints and they took twenty-seven 8 x 10 colored glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin’ what each one was, to be used as evidence against us.
Took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner, the southwest corner. And that’s not to mention the aerial photography!
Around here it’ll cost you plenty but the bulk of it is lawyers, insurance, inconvenience, jail time and bail. If the individual fines and court costs exceed what’s spent on the enforcement and prosecutions for my city as a whole I’d be suprised.
On topic, they had four cops in four cars with my 12 year daughter for swiping a trump flag. Whether they were bored, didn’t want to be standing there with a female juvenile alone, ran my name before I got there, I don’t know but only one did the talking and the rest stood around watching until everyone left. All together It was all pretty easy and no one seemed to feel uncomfortable except my daughter. I considered asking them while I was there but in my personal experience the answer would either be worthless or painfully obvious.