February 10, 2006
Crime and Punishment Department
A Few Slightly Bad Apples
In response to my post about proving the time of a ticket, T. F. Stern comments:
Having served 20 years as a uniformed cop I find it slightly amusing that some folks think this way. I wrote tickets, quite a few. If I made a mistake I would call the person at home and tell them to send me their copy so I could void it out, show up in court where I would explain the error and have it dismissed...
I checked his blog, and I'm not surprised. Mr. Stern is a church-going man who is still married to his "first and only sweetheart." He opposes large government and clearly worries about keeping America free. I certainly have no reason to doubt his personal integrity.
The truth is, every time I've been ticketed, I had it coming. I've always treated cops with respect, and they've pretty much always treated me the same way. I was just doing some thought experiments about how to handle such a situation if it ever arose. I certainly didn't mean to insult the great majority of police who are honest and diligent.
...All that being said, I would hope my point gets across that a huge majority of the tickets written are justified and the idea that it would be considered even slightly that cops lie to make their work card look better is not only improbable; it's insulting.
But...the thing is...I didn't pull this scenario out of thin air. Some cop really did ticket my friend's car for parking illegally at a time when it wasn't actually illegal to park, and the cop filled out a false time on the ticket too. That part of my posting wasn't made up. It's no great leap of imagination to suppose that cop also lied about his moving violations.
I realize that a parking ticket is a minor matter, and an illegal turn is only slightly more serious, but that doesn't make it OK. This wasn't some cop who crossed a line while trying to catch a bad guy. This was a cop who stuck a few citizens with bad tickets just to get his supervisor off his back. He was dogging the job, he knew he could get away with it, and he didn't care if a few citizens knew it too.
It was also about that time in my life (right after high school) that I had a disturbing argument with a cop myself. I don't remember the exact conversation, but I remember the gist of it.
It was at a police public relations event at a suburban shopping mall. The cops were being real friendly, showing off all their new computer equipment for their cars. I got interested in talking to one of them about it, we chatted for a few minutes, and then because we seemed to be getting along, I asked him about a situation that had been bothering me since high school.
When I got my driver's license, I ended up giving a lot of rides to other kids from my school who didn't have cars. I asked the cop what would happen to me if we got pulled over and one of them turned out to have something on him, like illegal drugs. Would I be in trouble for driving him around?
The cop responded, "If I found drugs on him, I'd find them on you too."
"No you wouldn't."
"Yes, I would."
"No," I said, puzzled, "I don't do drugs. You wouldn't find anything on me."
"I'm absolutely positive that I would."
And so on.
Afterward, I was puzzled by this conversation, and by the cop's obstinate insistence that I would have drugs on me, even though I explained that I didn't do drugs. It wasn't until much later that I realized what had really happened: He had threatened to plant drugs on me.
He was a suburban cop and I was a city kid, so maybe this was his way of warning me to keep myself and my junkie friends out of his town. I don't know. But he was willing to plant evidence on someone, and he didn't mind that I knew it. That's a little scary.
These events were over 20 years ago, and by all accounts the local police are very professional these days. I don't want to make a big deal out of small incidents like these, when the majority of my encounters with police have been very professional and courteous. Still, things like that have stuck in my head and colored my perception of the police all these years.
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Even for those of us whose encounters with police have most emphatically NOT been "very professional and courteous" in the majority of cases, we can concede that a lot of individual cops are honest people we wouldn't mind having as neighbors or friends.
But Lord Acton was right. Power does corrupt...or at least it exerts a disproportionate attraction on the corruptible. It takes a much stronger constitution to stay honest when you're implicitly trusted than it does when you're just an average Joe. And recent changes in the law have given unprecedented tools to those cops who _aren't_ strong enough to resist the temptations to abuse their power. Add to this the already-widespread practice among police of covering for one another, and you have a situation where the civilian population can't tell the difference between an honest and self-sacrificing public servant and a sadistic bully with a gun, until it's too late.
Is it any wonder that we tend to approach contact with police from a posture of defensiveness?
Yeah...most cops are probably decent people. But there are a lot of very good reasons I'd sooner slit my own throat than move back to Michigan, and all of those reasons wear blue uniforms.