You don't eff with the po-leece..

I tend to be sympathetic to the police. I mean, I complain about my helpdesk job, but I don't have to deal with anyone shooting at me, and very few of my callers are drunk or on drugs, at least when they are on the phone with me. Maybe it comes from reading David Simon's book Homicide, or watching too many episodes of The Wire, but I tend to side with the cops when I hear about a police involved shooting. It kind of brings to mind the line from A Few Good Men, where one of the Navy JAG attorneys is asked why she likes the navy guys who are being court-marshalled so much, and she says that it's because they stand on a line and tell us that everything is going to be allright.

But there is one thing about seeing a cop that always makes me want to start humming some of Ice Cube's "F*** the Police" - speed traps. I drove up to New Jersey today from Baltimore by way of Pennsylvania, and there were a ton of speed traps. Considering that it's getting towards the end of the month, that makes me wonder if rumors that cops give out tickets at the end of the month to make a quota are true. None of the areas that the cops were set up were dangerous - they were mostly straight stretches of road in a clear area.

To me, speed traps don't exist to make driving safer - they, like red light cameras, are designed as a tax on people unlucky enough to be caught. Pretty much everyone speeds, and everyone is a potential criminal. This is a wide-open opportunity for police to profile by race or age or gender or car type, and even if they don't, it makes people wonder if they do.

Mad Anthony has only gotten stopped for speeding once so far, back in his wild college days. I was on the debate team, and was piloting a college-owned 15 passenger Ford Econoline down 29 South to a tournament at UVA. I got stopped for doing 73 in a 55. Almost everyone on the way to the debate got snagged. You also could pay your fine by credit card. While a 2-point ticket isn't supposed to affect insurance, I did get turned down for a "safe driver discount" last year when I changed insurance companies because of that ticket. Now, if one of my fellow debaters had been driving, I wouldn't have gotten that ticket and would be considered a safe driver - although I wouldn't be any better a driver, just luckier.

For many people, the only time they deal with the police besides having an accident or being a crime victim is when they get pulled over. I don't think speed is as dangerous as the safety nazis like to say it is, and I don't think speed traps have an impact on making the roads safer. What they do is make citizens not like cops so much, and to me that does more damage than any potential benefit.

My dad is the very model of a law-abiding citizen. He is one of the few people I know who regularly drives below the speed limit. For the most part he has usually figured that people who get pulled over deserve it. That changed a few years ago when he got pulled over at a NJ inspection checkpoint and fined $41 because his left high beam was burned out. He now has a much more negitive view of the police and traffic enforcement.

I do have to say that the MD, PA, and even NJ state troopers I've passed in the 5 or so years I've been driving back and forth between NJ and MD seem to be more reasonable than the VA sheriff I was unlucky enough to encounter. I've regularly driven by them at 15 or 20 mph above the limit without being pulled over, so it seems like they for the most part just pull over the very fast drivers. I do keep wondering if I should buy a radar detector before my luck runs out. I had one, but it stopped sticking to my windsheild, and I never bothered to replace or fix it.