Tennessee doesn’t even give you a second plate to put on the front. How could I possibly be ticketed for not having something that doesn’t exist just because I’m driving through Michigan? (or any other state that does use a front plate?)
I don’t know, but I’d be curious to hear the answer myself as well.
I was pretty sure, I thought he was drving back from a game in Ann Arbor, but I could be wrong. Somewhere in the midwest I guess.
And in CA, they are “written” on a cute handheld computer, that sends it straight into some big old database. Even parking tickets.
:dubious:
Some of these cop stories are amazing to me. I have always lived in good-sized cities, and maybe these things happen in small towns. I mean, drive to the police station by midnight to show me your card? You have got to be kidding. Was it Mayberry?
Let me make this clear YOUR WIFE WAS GIVEN A BREAK. A BIG ONE. And she insists on arguing it. :rolleyes: She probably got out of a 3 or 4 point ticket and instead got a minor document violation. Nothing bizzaro about it. She was caught doing something wrong, something that I am sure pisses off everyone reading this, and she didn’t get a ticket for it. HE WAS GIVING HER A BREAK! DON"T ARGUE IT.
It has played out like this with me. “I had you doing 40mph in a 25 zone. I’m giving you a warning for that. Here is a ticket for not wearing your seatbelt.” “But I took it off just before you walked up!” “Ok I could be wrong. Do you want me to void out the no-point $40 ticket and instead write up the 4-point $300 ticket?” Usually they get the idea. Usually.
And yes it is not possible to just rip up a ticket. There is a process to void them out. Each voided ticket must be approved by a judge in court and there must be a good reason for it. Obviously we try to do it as little as possible.
Uhhh, maybe some places but not everywhere. Have you ever heard of “fixing a ticket”? That is where you know someone on the police force that you can call just to delete an speeding tickets or minor infractions that you, and maybe your family, that any incur. I grew up in Louisiana and live in Massachusetts and have that system to tap into if I need it. My parents did in Louisiana and my in-laws have it in Massachusetts. The latter exercise that “right” rather frequently. My FIL is a bad driver but he never has to worry about that because his 1st cousin once removed is a police officer and he can just call him.
Granted, Massachusetts and Louisiana are corrupt as ever living fuck and don’t like the same competition from Illinois. The system would be easy to correct but I don’t think the politicians want it to be because their family and friends would start racking up infractions. A shortened form of this system is the “Friends of Police” stickers to put on your back windshield. That just makes the officer reluctant to write a ticket at all because it is a waste of time given that you really are a close friend or relative of a police officer. This part doesn’t always work on honest cops but the behind the scenes ticket fixing usually does.
One of the guys on my shift gets calls from his father in law all the time about parking tickets. He tells his FIL to give him the ticket and he will “take care of it”. Which he does, by paying it. It’s just less of a hassle that way.
In the cops’ defense (well, the second one… the one at the university was just a bit of a jerk by writing the ticket before even verifying the facts, IMHO), this was in Southern Ontario, but not Toronto, which I’m sure doesn’t see that many Québec-licensed cars. Had it happened in Ottawa, it would just be bizarre, but in the area where I was, he was just doing his job.
Québec doesn’t issue front end plates (you cannot get one, period), and we don’t have registration stickers on the plate, either. No cop ever asked me about the registration, though. In fact, the inside of the registration paper (it’s typically folded over) has a statement reading
I suppose it was once an issue, so that statement was added to prevent drivers from having to fight tickets for something that wasn’t illegal anyways.
I’d be quite surprised if someone with a car that was fully licensed and registered, 100% legally in one province/state would get a ticket for something like not having a second plate in another province/state; aren’t there legal agreements between them to prevent this kind of stuff? Doesn’t one recognise the laws of the other?
If the only thing he had done that struck me as odd was writing the license plate violation instead of the shoulder thing, I wouldn’t have posted it. What I thought was really really weird was the fact that a) he returned her call at all, and b) he took her word for it and pulled the ticket. (He told her that he had not turned it in yet, and would not turn it in, so I don’t think he’ll have to go to court to get it dismissed.)
In your experience, is that a normal thing to do? If someone you had ticketed a couple days before called you, would you even return the call? And would you agree to not turn in the ticket based on their assertion that they were innocent? That’s the strangest part of the story, as far as I’m concerned. What do you think about it?
One other thing- a police officer friend of mine said he would bet that the guy didn’t know the statute for driving on the shoulder and didn’t feel like looking it up, which is why he wrote the plate violation, the statute number of which every officer knows by heart.
I’ve never had an officer of the law promise to tear up a ticket, but I do know that some of them will cut you a break if you are respectful and appear to be non-threatening.
One night, I was on my way home from work (about 50 miles from my home) on the evening shift. I had just come off a parkway where the speed limit was 70 mph and onto US31E, where it went down to 45 mph when I noticed that I hadn’t reduced my speed. I saw a set of headlights behind me as I slowed down and thought to myself “Gee, the only folks on this road this time of night are the police and truck drivers and that isn’t a tractor trailer.”
Well, it became obvious that it was the former when the blue lights came on. When the officer walked up to my vehicle, I had the window rolled down, the interior lights on and my driver’s license and registration out. He asked if I knew why I was being stopped and I told him that it might be because I hadn’t slowed down to the speed limit yet.
He chuckled and said that he had clocked me doing 73 in a 45, enough to warrant a reckless driving charge if he wanted. While I was apologizing, he caught sight of something sticking out of my purse. It was a ziplock bag that I used to carry change in the pocket of my lab coat from work. The lightbulb went off for me when I saw the change on his face.
I told him what it was and that I was going to pull it out unless he would rather I not, so that he could see it (lucky for me that there was still change in it, verifying my story) and handed it to him. I heard him chuckle again.
He then told me that he had seen me begin to slow down even before he turned on his lights and that he didn’t see any need to actually ticket me, to be careful going home and let me go.
I think that he might have been part of the bizarro world.
Most cops I know write tickets to maybe half of the people they pull over. They exceptions are those in the traffic section who are pressured to write a ton a month and if you are on a state/federally sponsored detail like aggresive driver or click it or ticket. He was probably just looking for drunks at that time so he let you go.
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I don’t own the car, I’m just an authorized driver
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I can’t afford to spend money on another plate
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So far it hasn’t been an issue
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I’m extremely careful about following all of the traffic laws
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I’m sure the traffic cops around here recognize my car at this point, and have filed me under “not a troublemaker”
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I don’t carry illegal things around in my car anymore, so I’m not that worried
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You could say I have a passing familiarity with the “system” Shagnasty can tap into.
:eek:
I’m going to have to research this, but I’m 98% positive that a California cop can’t legally do that. Meaning, I’ve been practically swimming in cops for a while now and even been pulled over here several times while driving a car with no front plate, and the issue has simply not come up.
I’ve seen the reverse of the no-front-plate pullover – a speed trap on a back road in Georgia where they were pulling over every car that did have a front plate (since Georgia doesn’t issue them) and ticketing them for whatever they could come up with. It was seriously that blatant; we were waved past, as were other Georgia-plated cars we saw, while the three cars pulled over were all from out of state.
My early childhood was in Maryland, and my dad tells of a notorious speed trap just a few feet on the Delaware side of the state line, where Marylanders, Virginians and Washingtonians were pulled over and ticketed for things that they clearly didn’t do. Presumably lots of people would rather pay the ticket off than to go out-of-state again to contest it, and those who do show up in court, well, the case gets dropped and then they owe the court a couple hunnerd bucks in processing fees. That’s how it went down 15 years ago, anyway.