Just had a couple quick questions that I was hoping someone could answer.
At night, do cops always have to have their lights on, so a) people can always find one in case of an emergency and b) so it isn’t a huge shock when you get pulled over for speeding.
I understand the first one, but a few of my friends told me that when cops are using radar detectors to pull you over, they must have their lights on and can not be sitting there in the dark waiting to pull you over.
Can you be pulled over by a cop from a neighboring town for speeding, or can only state cops pull you over for speeding in any part of the state?
There are a half dozen or more imaginary rules that people “know” that police must follow to give themselves away when trying to aprehend lawbreakers. They are bunk.
A cop can sit by the side of the road or hide behind a bush and with ot without his lights on and his bustr will still stand up in court.
He can’t drive on the highway with his lights off after dark (or whenever your state mandates lights be on), but sitting along the road, he has no requirement to turn on his lights.
Local (township, municipal, or county) police may only issue tickets for traffic violations in the jurisdiction which has commissioned them to be police. They can follow you out of the jusrisdiction under the theory of “close pursuit” to stop you, but they may not issue a ticket for a violation committed outside their jurisdiction. (There may be states where these rules vary, but Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and, as far as I know, Illinois work the way I described and I would guess that the principle is the same across the country.)
(There are a few places around Cleveland where cops have sat outside the border of their own city, running radar on the stretch of road inside their city. As far as I know, the tickets were held legal when challenged in court. However, I also know that the city in which they were sitting raised a stink because the city giving tickets was giving its neighbor a “bad name.”)
A sort of related observation I had was that I’ve never seen a cop car with one head light out. I beleive their vehicles are very well maintained and have to be quite up to snuff about having everything work if they are going to be handing out tickets to others who have burnt out lights and for safety reasons. It’s probably not the smartest thing, but whenever I see a car at dusk/night in my rear-view mirror with only one headlight I never get paranoid about my speed thinking it might be a cop. The problem with that is that a headlight can burn out now… maybe it just happened… I also would be wary of ghost cars - I don’t think there is a way of picking them out from a crowd every time. And of course the whole over-riding problem with looking for little (mostly non-existant)loopholes to the people concerned is that you were breaking the law, knew it, were caught by a guy who knew it, and would be obviously grasping for straws trying to get away with it. Save yourself a lot of futile, frustrating “legal-loophole” research hours… don’t break the law.