Traffic Check Points: Good or Bad?
 

The earlier post about police brutality when getting tickets for running/not running a stop sigh got me to thinking. In almost every city in the San Diego area there are places where police cars sit and wait for people to break a law that most times is never enforced. I know of one on Las Vegas, Huntington Beach, Venice Beach, San Diego, La Jolla, Delmar and of course in my home of Chula Vista and it is very interesting to watch. I was eating lunch at the Burger King near the Costco on East "H" street a few days ago and the police were raking the tickets in, here's how and what I think they were writing for: Going west bound there is a right turn lane and it DOES NOT have a green arrow, so you can guess what happens next. The m/c officer stands around the corner and waives every car that fails to stop (about all of them in a 20 minute period) into the Pep Boys parking lot where other officers hand out the tickets. Almost everyone is a Mexican woman talking on their cell phone ($$$$$), NOT wearing their seat belt ($$$$$) and kids in the back jumping around with no car seat ($$$$$$$$$) and of course the failure to stop ($$$$$$). There may have been some others and I did get to see 3 cars get towed and the women were sure pissed off it seemed!? From what the ladies at the credit union up the street tell me that is done at least once a week, maybe more often!

There is one that is also run outside the court houses in Chula Vista and also San Diego on DUI arrest days and that pulls everyone over and I hear 80% of the cars get towed as the driver just lost their license!

If anyone else has interesting spots like this feel free to list them......

Good if you are a good guy, bad if you are a bad guy.

Rolling through a red light/stop sign while making a right turn may be a ticky-tack infraction. But I don't have a problem with writing people up for breaking that law. I'd grumble (to myself) if I got such a ticket, but I'd pay it if I did it. It's the manufacturing of infractions (when you did nothing wrong) that I have a problem with.

Talking on the cell/not wearing a seat belt/not having car seats/not having license or registration are all infractions, too. If you don't want to get ticketed for those offenses, then don't talk on a (non hands free) cell phone, wear your seat belt, put your kids into car seats, have a valid drivers license, and have insurance and registration for your car. Oh, and stop for red lights and stop signs. Problems solved.

While I'd rather the cops go after the real dangers on the road, of which there are plenty and from which they'd raise at least as much revenue, I have less of a problem with them pulling people over for an actual reason than running roadside sobriety checkpoints. I have a real problem with getting pulled over for having done nothing wrong so they can go on a fishing expedition.

I understand your point about the sobriety checkpoints, Rick. We've had OT and PARF discussions before about the Constitutionality of sobriety checkpoints. At the same time, count me as one of the roll-over weenies that is OK with them, as I think they serve more good than evil.

If they stop me for no reason, they can be sure I'm gonna waste a lot of their time, ask for the supervisor and generally make myself way not worth their while.

It is all about revenue generation.

All that tells is that they have too many police in that town, and that much of that town's budget is dependant upon traffic infraction generated revenue. I have a real problem with that. I don't think that's the America most of us would like to live in; it's way more like some third world shytehole banana dictatorship.

John, I know that area well. Although it's a minor infraction, I'm happy that they manage to tag those women for the cell phone/seat belt/car seat/registration/insurance things too. That area is unbelievable for the number of women in large SUV's blasting down the road, changing lanes abruptly, while gesturing, talking & texting on their cell phones and yelling at their kids at the same time. Downright dangerous to be on the road!!

Hypothetically:

Suppose you were the father of a 17 year old girl who was minding her own business and was killed by a drunk driver with three convictions on his record yet was still driving. Drunk.
Would you still oppose random check points?
That happened to someone I work with.


OK different hypothetical scenario:
suppose your wife was jogging along pacific coast highway in the middle of the day and was run over by a drunk driver who didn't have a license because of prior DUI's and had just been let out of a half-way house.
Your wife is now a quadriplegic and can't take care of herself, much less her two young kids. Her medical bills are into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and her in-home care will add up to about 70% of your take-home pay.
How would you think about random DUI checkpoints?
That actually happened to a friend of the family.


People suck. Letting people get away with sucking because you don't want to be inconvenienced for 15 seconds sucks too.

I'd gladly give up 15 seconds of my time to help make sure some POS doesn't kill someone I care about.

If we could keep the sucky people off the road we wouldn't need check points. But it's against the law to shoot them, go figure.

NB 4th Ave at the bottom of the hill where CVS Pharmacy is...M/C cop sits behind white van at Vista Paints on 4th and pulls people over turning right onto 4th from C St (Where DMV is) Seems they changed that intersection awhile ago to no turn on red.

SOME checkpoints have their place, but generally no...nothing but a revenue stream.

I wrote a letter once to the Fairfax Co. cops, asking them to set up a patrol or checkpoint at the Vienna Metro station because cars were simply not stopping for pedestrians in the crosswalk going to a neighboring parking garage. Several times I came close to getting hit when there was no excuse at all for the cars to not see people in the crosswalk, both during daylight and night time hours. A few weeks later, sure enough, the cops were there on foot pulling people over and handing out tickets. Yeah, they probably got plenty of revenue from that, but they fixed the problem pretty quickly and were doing it for a safety issue.

In another spot in Springfield, VA, cops hid behind a large sign to nail cars going straight from the left-turn-only lane. Problem here was that the signage for the restricted lane was pretty bad, there was not much room to change lanes before the intersection and if you missed it, you had a lot of work to do to make a U-turn farther down the road. And the cops also caused a lot of traffic with their stops. THis was a case of revenue raising. They could have easily done some painting and added a sign or two to fix the problem. But it was worth too much $$ to keep it the way it was.

Yes, I would still oppose them.


I would still oppose them.


Living in a police state really sucks, too. One of my dearest friends grew up behind the Iron Curtain, actually having escaped Communist Czechlosavakia in 1972. At that time, the police could stop anyone at any time for any reason and make up anything. He risked his life to escape that. I'll never understand why folks are so eager to see it here.

The real answer is to demand meaningful sentences for those who break meaningful laws, not to pick away at essentially good people with and endless array of nuisance laws. We punish too many people for too little, and we do not punish those who need it nearly enough.

Our DUI laws, for example, as "tough" as they are, are badly in need of reform. We treat someone who blows an .08 the same way we treat someone who blows a .20 or .30. The latter belongs in jail for a good long time; the former, maybe a stiff fine and loss of priviledges for awhile.

What is the average time served for a murder one these days? Years ago it was about eight years. You've got to be farkin' kidding me. Guys have been behind bars for longer for non-violent crimes, like pot possesion for example.

This situation, in which honest citizens are regularly punished for totally innocuous "offenses" while hardened criminals walk free among us, has eroded public respect for law and order. We need to fix that.

Bad if you are an American.

If we're going to have stop at intersection - seatbelt - cellphone - carseat laws, they should be enforced. Might as well do it as efficiently.

sammyG2 says it best, Jeff Higgins is nuts

Sure its income generation, whats the problem with having idiots pay more than their share

If Jeff Higgins is nuts, give me a double shot of whatever he's drinking.

Because that's the kind of nuts we need more of in this country, and the kind of nut i identify with.

Count on it, if you are ever in Seattle.

Funny how to some, those of us who espouse liberty and privacy are somehow "nuts". The (now sadly eroding) principles upon which this great nation were founded seem to be lost on these guys.

Like Ben Franklin said, "those who would sacrifice some measure of liberty for some measure of security deserve neither".

These guys were probably playground and/or hall monitors in grade school.