I was reading a linked story in another thread about the 1980 Harvey’s Casino bombing and came upon this passage:
On 14 August 1981, FBI special agents once again brought 20-year-old John Jr. in for questioning. They told him that they knew that he had lied about his movements and whereabouts on 25-27 August of the prior year. They had a speeding ticket with his name on it from the morning after the bungled payoff, issued on the highway between Fresno and Lake Tahoe. The citation noted that he had been driving a gold Volvo and there had been two other men in the car with him.
I know it might vary by jurisdiction, but is it normal to note on a speeding ticket how many people are in the car?
Back when our UTC (Uniform Traffic Citation) were hand written the entire back of the officers copy was lined for notes. Statements made, vehicle condition, and number of occupants was routinely written down.
Now that everything is typed into a mobile data unit there is a separate window for those notes with drop down boxes
Same info is included.
I rarely wrote any notes on our file copy; usually admission of guilt, or possibly other uncited infractions. I had never made a note about other occupants, and it seems unusual, but certainly possible.
Or they were bluffing.
One of my neighbors / friends is a retired FL state LEO. And was before that a county deputy sheriff.
He once mentioned that one of the notes the deputies put on the citation copy the judge got was a secret code about the driver’s demeanor / attitude to the officer. Which ranged from “calm / professional” to “flaming asshole”. Which info may have some influence on how the judge disposed of the case if it came to that.
The relevance to the OP being there’s more going on with citations than the mere infraction info.
I don’t fill out a contact card if an actual cite is issued. Everything is put on the cite and the notes section. The only time I fill out a card for a cite is if the citation is going to be mailed. That usually doesn’t happen on traffic but on ordinance cites like DC, urinating in public, failing to curb a dog, etc.
I’m not saying your friend is a liar but it’s hard for me to imagine one of our judges giving a shit about us enough to learn a secret code.
In the days of paper tickets I would use a type of shorthand in the note section. It wasn’t a secret code. It was shorthand that only I understood and used for brevity. I wrote reports all day long I wasn’t going to turn a simple ticket into another report. As I got older I became lazier and stopped putting notes except under extraordinary circumstances. They never had any bearing on a case so it seemed like a waste of time.
During the initial call to dispatch about a traffic stop it’s standard procedure to state how many passengers there are. In modern times the dispatcher will note that in the computer entry for that stop.