That’s NCIS. They have a monitor in their HQ that is constantly tuned to ZNN.
Is any of this legal?
“Collecting donations for the Policemen’s Ball?”
I suppose so. I mean, any cop has discretion to not give you a ticket. I’ve been pulled over for speeding before and let go with a warning (pre-card). If a cop is on the fence about whether or not to let you go, seeing that you’re friends/family with another cop could sway them in your favor.
My cards are printed by the officers’ FOP lodge, with the lodge president’s name and signature on them. My friends’ put their names and badge numbers. I’m sure this doesn’t give any legality to it but it does at least give it provenance.
My cop friends have told me that their cards have been ignored before, and that they’ve ignored cards. And usually they felt the ticketing/arresting officer was justified in ignoring them.
Here’s a blog post on cards from a lawyer in New York.There’s a short video at the end by VICE, where the lawyer is interviewed about the cards. The video doesn’t seem to get any further into the legality of the cards. They do talk to one officer who says they’re over-used and he doesn’t like to give them out.
Maybe.
PBA and FOP cards are mostly a Northeast thing. Cops in most of the country don’t know what they are or at least don’t care about them.
The PBA does not give out anything for donations. The FOP does. That crap means little or nothing to anyone I know. Don’t care if you went online and donated to the FOP and got a car shield. In my state you can pay for law enforcement memorial plates. The joke is that anyone who has those plates is dirty.
We are given discretion to ticket or give warnings to drivers for motor vehicle offenses. I use my discretion and if I can help it I don’t ticket doctors, nurses, any hospital personnel, teachers, anyone who relies on driving to feed their family, Firefighters, EMTs, Paramedics, clergy, military, old people, kids just starting to drive, township residents… I also don’t ticket those that I can rely on to stop and help me if I’m getting my ass kicked on the side of the road so cops don’t get tickets and neither do those that support them enough to get a card. Take away my discretion for them then I should have to write everyone else I find a reason to give a warning to.
They are absolutely not a get out of jail free card. Do something that warrants an arrest and it doesn’t matter who you are or who you know.
Got one from a highway patrolman in Alabama (30 years ago!). State budget was in trouble, gas prices were up, troopers were told to reduce patrolling. I saw a trooper filling up the cruiser and I paid for his gas (I’m sure he had a state credit card for when he was away from a state gas depot). He asked me why I did it. I said I’d rather him cruise the highway and maybe help out a stranded motorist or get to an accident faster than sit in a speed trap and catch me. He laughed and gave me his card with his ID on it. Wrote his office and home number on it. Said as long as I was not doing anything too stupid, it’d be worth a stern warning if I showed it. Screw up big time and it was worthless.
Loach nailed it. We had regular cards and Family cards. IIRC, I had to pay $10@ for Family cards and I got ten regulars for free. I almost never gave out regular cards. I guess the family cards were supposed to get you a little more “courtesy”. The cards might help if it was a close call but, usually, the officer would make his decision to write or not independent of the card. The nature of the offense and attitude of the driver have a much greater impact than a card.
Now that I think of it, the first time he used the card, we got busted at a college party at a bar where pretty much everyone was underage and it got us all off the hook. I don’t think that ever made its way back to his dad. The speeding did make it back to his dad. Like I said it was technically reckless driving to be going 25 mph over the speed limit but he was merely zipping down the left lane in light traffic, it was not dangerous.
And yeah, I think he would have rather had the ticket.
Business owners in NYC (a few dacades ago at least) were offered a bronze shield that you could bolt to your read bumper. They were marked with serial numbers and they got you out of parking tickets. I don’t know if it got you out of speeding tickets but it cut our tickets for double parking our delivery van to almost nothing (double parking tickets are almost a cost of doing business in NYC).
So, summing up the stories, they sometimes get you out of a speeding ticket, and sometimes not.
Sounds like my exact history of stops for speeding. So, card v no card makes no difference.
That is definitely not the case now. The meter maids have uniforms that look sort of like police but they are not. They have to write a lot of tickets a day. They will ticket marked police cars that are on calls.
There does not appear to be a lot of debate here, with quite a bit of (anecdotal) testimony. I going to nudge this into General Questions.
[ /Moderating ]
Come to think of it. That might have started under Guiliani and his broken windows policy.
I have a friend who is a retired cop. His car and all the cars in his family have the FOP stickers and license plate frames on the back. He says that cops will notice the ornamentation as they walk up and it often initiates a conversation with the driver about the sticker. He told his kids to just inform the cop that their dad is a LEO, and they might get some lenience. Certainly not diplomatic immunity, but the “professional courtesy” might mean a warning rather than a ticket, or a lesser violation.
I got a standard, dept issued business card from a NJ cop, I laughed when I turned it over & in big, bold letters it stated, “This is not a courtesy card.” So yeah, they’re a common enough thing that certain cards are not courtesy cards.
My friend needs to get a new printed metal ‘family’ one; her dad is the first deputy sheriff/undersheriff but she got married so the name doesn’t match her DL anymore.
I hadn’t heard they are ticketing marked police cars on calls. I work for a state agency and we have placards that allow us to park in certain places and not to pay parking meters while we are on official business. Our cars get ticketed pretty regularly. But it doesn’t matter, because they get dismissed as I’m sure any tickets written to police vehicles do. Although I’m a little surprised to hear tickets are written on police vehicles, because the traffic enforcement agents are part of the NYPD.
They ultimately fall under the Chief of the Traffic Division but it is a civilian agency until you get to the upper levels of administration. I have yet to hear one good thing about them from anyone on the NYPD. They ticket even around precincts where the cops are allowed to park. They can eventually get voided but it’s a pain in the ass.
As to the general morality of such things, consider that Timothy Mcveigh was stopped on a routine traffic stop. Now the reason for his stop was a little more extreme than most (not having plates at all), but whenever an officer of the law catches someone in violation of the law, there’s a reasonable suspicion that said person is up to no good and should be worth the policeman’s time to investigate. The reason for the infraction ticket when you’ve done something you shouldn’t have is to pay for the time the police officer has to use to check up on your plates and such, and provide incentive for people to not do dangerous things. If you have a courtesy card from a fellow officer, the officer on the scene can be confident you’re normally a good guy, and by seeing who the card came from, the officer can provide leverage on someone socially through whoever it’s from if they notice a lot of cards coming from a particular person. So unless you did something really bad, they’ll use their discretion and just let you off with a warning.
One time I was headed home from Columbus towards Detroit and was speeding on a county road on the way back to US-23 and was stopped, and I’m fairly sure the policeman was looking specifically for drunk drivers considering his actions. When it was clear I was not, and me being far away from home while dark on Sunday (but within driving distance to get there), he thought it personally reasonable that I would be speeding and since it wasn’t too excessive it wasn’t causing any harm to anyone else - he just cautioned me that I watch out for deer. Another time I was pulled over on Wayne State’s campus in Detroit. He probably was looking for real criminals happening to flaunt traffic laws and let me off with a warning as well. But the first three times I was stopped, I was excessively speeding and earned the tickets I received, and while my heart shrank those last two times, the fact that I wasn’t what the officer was looking for, while the previous times I was, was exactly enough to earn a mere warning apparently.
Of course, now that I’ve said that, the next major domestic terrorist attack will be by someone who has a policeman’s courtesy card, and they’ll use it when they’re speeding away from the scene and get away clean…
I heard a story on a podcast where the guy was a New Yorker with a PBA card he got from his cop best friend, so he would show it whenever he got pulled over for some minor infraction and the cops would let him go every time. But one time he decided to show it to a county cop in upstate New York and the cop got PISSED. Claimed the man was trying to “bribe” him and made him step out of the car while he searched him. Claimed to not know what a PBA card was (which the man didn’t believe) and generally hassled him enough to make him know not to use it outside of the NYC area.