COPS! ive been stopped 4 times!

[speeder]

You can't go driving around with little piddly equipment violations and no seatbelt on and then complain about getting pulled-over, IMO. When I see someone not wearing a seatbelt or talking on a cellphone up to their ear, I think, What's the matter with them? Do they want to get pulled-over??"

Don't give 'em a reason. I've had the police on my rear bumper for several blocks a couple of times, just dying to pull me over but my equipment is in order, my tags check-out when they run them and I'm not breaking the law. Roll smooth, as they say.

[rammstein]

No seatbelt? You want to die?

[m21sniper]

Seatbelts are for....

[Jim Richards]

hep cats?

[Laneco]

Originally Posted by masraum

Did you stick a milk crate in it? How in the heck do you drive a car with no seats?

I was sitting on one of the old catalytic converters we have sitting around the shop. It was a 911 cat if that helps....

I could BARELY see over the dashboard, that's why I threw the cat on the floor and sat on it. Good Lord, that sounds even stupider when I am typing it... I simply am not eligible for "cool"...

angela

[K9Torro]

I know how you can make it STOP, ready , ready , ready , wait for it, wait for it, ok here it is STOP DRIVING, there it is that easy.

Todd & his trusty sidekick Torro

[MMARSH]

Originally Posted by gprsh924

I agree with your sentiment that getting pulled over by the gestapo sucks, but it does seem like each time you were pulled over was for a valid reason.

Exactly. Fix the stuff with your vehicles then you might have a valid complaint.

[T77911S]

Originally Posted by gprsh924

I agree with your sentiment that getting pulled over by the gestapo sucks, but it does seem like each time you were pulled over was for a valid reason.

sure, but the headlight, i hate to say it, has been out for a looooong time, bad wire. and, its not just me, i am seeing multiple people pulled over when i go somewhere.

[T77911S]

not saying i did not deserve to be stopped. but i was mainly curious if you guys have noticed an increase in cops pulling people.
a friend said he got a ticket for doing 32 in a 30.
a lot of cops are getting laid off due to budget cuts around here too.
speeding? normally i stay at 10 over, most of the time i dont even slow down when there is a cop.
this is the second time i got stopped for speeding, the one before was several years ago. both times i told the cop i drive here almost every day, this is what the traffic is normally doing, you guys dont ever stop me so i figure you are ok with it. or something along those lines. ooops, gave out me secret. both times i got stopped i was solo, so slow down when your the only one on the road.
like i said, my point was really that the cops are more active lately and was wandering if it is the same in other places. i even asked a cop about them being more active and he said oh yea, and some out there have a zero tolerance now. he did not say why.
yes, my wife gets mad at me beacuse i get warnings, she is not so lucky even though she is nice to look at, aand has a healthy chest.

[Zeke]

I just wish the cops around here would stop these cars that have one headlight aimed incorrectly, usually high and to the right and in my mirrors.

[GO DAWG GO]

Milt-

Tailgaters who are on your arse when you cant go any faster in traffic should be beaten. The one headlight out of alignment and blazing in your eyes at night where you have to cover the mirror should be a crime too.

I dunno..why does it seem that the IQ of most people on the freeway must be slightly under ~60.

Ever see the idiot tailgating someone and hitting there brakes every other second so the maintain there 3 feet from the other guys bumper.

I had a dream I was a highway patrolman and spent my time arresting azzhole tailgaters...i hate um.

[m21sniper]

IME cops are the worst tailgaters around.

I swear they do it to get people to speed up so they can ticket them.

[RoninLB]

Originally Posted by T77911S

. but i was mainly curious if you guys have noticed an increase in cops pulling people.

Share The Pain

The following article from the New York Times provides a fair warning of how state and local governments intend to "share the pain" during the current recession.

Motorists will be the favorite target for new fees, fines, surcharges, and special taxes designed to obscure how the new money will actually be spent.

The one means of protest available to all of us is to remember who voted for this sanitized theft and vote for their opponent at the first opportunity. It won't hurt to express that intention when these proposals are being considered by local and state governments.

NYT: Cities turn to fees to fill budget gaps
'Streetlight user fees' among the new charges as governments get creative
By David Segal, The New York Times -- April 11, 2009

After her sport utility vehicle sideswiped a van in early February, Shirley Kimel was amazed at how quickly a handful of police officers and firefighters in Winter Haven, Fla., showed up. But a real shock came a week later, when a letter arrived from the city billing her $316 for the cost of responding to the accident.

“I remember thinking, ‘What the heck is this?’ ” says Ms. Kimel, 67, an office manager at a furniture store. “I always thought this sort of thing was covered by my taxes.”

It used to be. But last July, Winter Haven became one of a few dozen cities in the country to start charging “accident response fees.” The idea is to shift the expense of tending to and cleaning up crashes directly to at-fault drivers. Either they, or their insurers, are expected to pay.

Such cash-per-crash ordinances tend to infuriate motorists, and they often generate bad press, but a lot of cities are finding them hard to resist. With the economy flailing and budgets strained, state and local governments are being creative about ways to raise money. And the go-to idea is to invent a fee — or simply raise one.

Ohio’s governor has proposed a budget with more than 150 new or increased fees, including a fivefold increase in the cost to renew a livestock license, as well as larger sums to register a car, order a birth certificate or dump trash in a landfill. Other fees take aim at landlords, cigarette sellers and hospitals, to name a few.

Wisconsin’s governor, James E. Doyle, has proposed a charge on slaughterhouses that would be levied on the basis of each animal slaughtered. He also wants to more than triple the application charge for an elk-hunting license to $10, an idea that has raised eyebrows because the elk population in the state is currently too small to allow an actual hunting season.

Washington’s mayor, Adrian M. Fenty, has proposed a “streetlight user fee” of $4.25 a month, to be added to electric bills, that would cover the cost of operating and maintaining the city’s streetlights. New York City recently expanded its anti-idling law to include anyone parked near a school who leaves the engine running for more than a minute. Doing that will cost you $100.

“The most dangerous places on Staten Island are the schools at drop-off and dismissal time, when parents are parked three deep in the road,” says James S. Oddo, a City Council member from Staten Island who voted for the measure. “There is a mentality here that Johnny can’t walk 100 feet, he has to be dropped off right at the front of the school — and frankly that’s why Johnny is as pudgy as he is.”

Nothing, it seems, is off the table. In Pima County, Ariz., the County Board of Supervisors increased an assortment of fees, including the cost of AIDS testing. Florida has proposed raising medical visit co-payments for inmates in state prisons. Parking fees at the Honolulu Zoo could rise by 500 percent if a proposal there goes through.

Politicians tend to regard fees as more palatable than taxes, and more focused too. If a state needs to finance an infrastructure to oversee fishing, why shouldn’t fishermen foot the bill? But groups like the nonpartisan Tax Foundation in Washington worry that governments are now using fees to shore up budget shortfalls rather than cover specific costs incurred by specific users.

“When it comes to paying for bananas, you’ve got the market as a mechanism to make sure you’re paying a fair price,” says Josh Barro, a staff economist at the Tax Foundation. “But when it comes to getting your driver’s license renewed, the government has a monopoly, and you have no idea what it costs the state or what it’s doing with the money.”

Get-tough approach In some cases, towns say they are merely enforcing rules that have long been on the books. For the first time in years, for instance, officials at Londonderry, N.H., have mailed notices to dog owners reminding them to renew their annual dog licenses, which cost $6.50 apiece, or face a $25 fine. Town leaders think the get-tough approach could raise an additional $20,000, but Meg Seymour, the town clerk, is dreading local reaction. When the town last sent out fine notices, in 2002, the calls to her office were vicious.

“Let’s just say that we’re the ones who take the venting,” she said. “You have no idea.”

If past patterns hold, the new wave of fees is just getting started. Gary Wagner, a professor of economics at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, was one author of a study of moving-vehicle and parking tickets in North Carolina, covering a 14-year period. He found a strong correlation between a dip in government revenue and a rise in ticket-writing by the police.

“But there’s a lag time,” Mr. Wagner said. “Typically, it’s about a year after the revenues drop that the police start writing more tickets.”

If you date the start of the downturn to last September, the ticket-writing is just getting under way. And New Yorkers can expect more days like the one in mid-March, when the police wrote 9,016 driving-while-phoning tickets within 24 hours, roughly 20 times the usual number.

The “accident response fee” idea could spread, too. A company in Dayton, Ohio, called the Cost Recovery Corporation specializes in setting up collection systems for municipalities that bill for police and fire responses. (The company keeps 10 percent of billings.) Inquiries have tripled in the last year, says the company’s president, Regina Moore.

“What we’re hearing from towns is, ‘The taxpayers are all over us; they don’t want to surrender more tax money,’ ” she said. “And response fees are basically a form of restitution, like paying for a stay in jail.”

Insurance companies loathe the idea, because inevitably customers assume that a crash fee is covered by their policies. (It isn’t, in most cases.) And unlike the pay-to-stay approach to jails, crash fees rarely play well in the media. The mayor of Duluth, Minn., backed off a crash fee proposal shortly after Jay Leno joked about the city, by name, in a “Tonight Show” monologue last year.

In Winter Haven, the accident response fee seemed to leaders to be a reasonable way to help finance the police and fire departments, but so far only 20 percent of the $32,000 that has been billed to at-fault drivers has been collected.

“We chose not to contract out the collection part of this, and frankly, because of staff cuts, we don’t have enough people to handle all the paperwork,” says Joy Townsend, the city’s communications officer. “We’re now evaluating how cost-effective this program is.”

Ms. Kimel, the S.U.V. driver in Florida, will not make the numbers look any better. She has no idea whether the city will come after her for that $316 bill, but she doesn’t care.

“I’m not paying,” she said, “because it isn’t fair.”

This story originally appeared in the The New York Times.

[speeder]

Outrageous.

[rnln]

I realized cops are everywhere nowadays. Maybe the reason is simply because they are lowed on budget.