Allow me to share with you why I despise police officers. It’s a massive chain reaction that they initiate with their initial failure to use their brain. Take a look at the exhausting requirements to be a police officer in Georgia:
1. High school diploma or G.E.D. (!)
2. Valid Georgia driver’s license
3. 21 years of age
4. Adequate vision (20/30 corrected)
5. Pass a variety of screening tests / no felonies on record
6. Pass a drug test
7. Complete police academy training
8. Possess the ability to enforce laws and learn procedures
Seriously. Look at that. Some of those things I had to do to graduate pre-school. Isn’t it alarming that someone with a G.E.D. can be a police officer? Someone with enough power to ruin your life? To cost you thousands of dollars? Think they don’t get paid well enough? Welcome to the club. They make, on average, a hell of a lot more than I do.
On to the time I lost what little respect I had for them. Near my apartment, there is a 4-way stoplight. People in Georgia can’t drive, so they can’t ever understand the whole yielding thing. If you’re in a right turn lane and you have a red light, you yield to the people across from you that are turning left on a green arrow. Common sense. If both lights are solid green, the people turning left yield to the people going right.
I was out with my ex-girlfriend and it was between 12:30-1AM or so. I came up to the intersection to turn right and my light was red. I go into the right turn lane and ALMOST come to a stop, we’re talking under 5mph and I just went ahead and turned. Yes, I know this is illegal because the law says you have to make a complete stop. Here’s the thing. If there are zero cars within sight and you are the only car at the light, what sense does it make to come to a complete stop and then take off again when turning right – of all things. So I turn right and immediately, the cop explodes out of a parking lot, which almost caused me to wreck because he almost t-boned me.
He asks me why I was being pulled over and I honestly had no idea. He claimed I was being cited for failure to obey a traffic signal. He said there were many complaints from the intersection and he was cracking down. The ticket was $115. The cost to my insurance was $750 a year for 3 years. That’s a total cost to me of over $2,300 – for absolutely nothing.
Tell me this: If there were complaints about the intersection, they are during the day when traffic was heavy and people honestly suck at yielding. There was NO ONE on the road besides me at this time of the night. My decision to roll through and turn right does not reflect on how I would have handled the same turn with lots of traffic. This is where police officers are hurt by their inability to think intelligently. When he pulled my driving record, he would have seen that I have zero tickets. No points on my license at all. This tells him that I’m either a good driver or I’m good at not getting caught. Second, the fact that I committed this action in the middle of the night with no traffic should have told him that maybe a verbal/written warning was in order. If you’re really concerned about the intersection and safety, pull me over and tell me. The fact that a cop would sit out there at that time and pull me over and give me a ticket for that offense is unbelievably ignorant and pathetic. I don’t know if it’s a power thing – him thinking I’m some well-off college kid taken care of by my family and wanting to teach me a lesson. Either way, it’s pathetic and that’s what you get for giving under-educated rednecks that much power. It really does make me sick.
If you read that and side with the police, then you obviously haven’t been screwed by them before. Just wait until you get a speeding ticket for 5mph over the limit or for 10mph over because your car picked up speed down a hill and you didn’t want to ride on your brakes. They know where to hide to catch people like this. Most of them are incapable of using judgment. They enforce to the letter of the law because they’re ignorant, plain and simple.
Moral of the story? Always hire a lawyer to take care of this stuff for you. The short-term cost is way lower than the long term damage you’ll pay via insurance.
Disclaimer: I have only have one traffic citation (this one) since I was 18 years old – over 8 years.
