[Jeff Higgins]

What recourse do we have when a cop is simply wrong? What if he wrote you up? If you fight it you wind up in court with your word against his. Absolutely impossible for you or him to prove a thing. Now what? The judge will almost certainly find for the cop.

I just went through this on a speeding charge. At the time I was stopped I had not been speeding... for at least half an hour. Maybe it's a kharma thing, but I digress. I took a day off from work and went to court, as much out of curiosity as anything else. I had not been in traffic court in 20 years.

I sat through three hours of the most incredible proceedings I have ever witnessed. Granted, there were the usual b.s. excuses that the judge sumarily blew off. There were, however, in addition to those, some of what I though were some very valid and pretty serious points raised by defendants. They were all pretty much sumarily blown off as well. No credence was given to anything a defendant had to say. Every implausible and incomplete statement made by a cop in person or in writing was accepted as gospel. If the statement was incomplete enough as to not provide enough information to find "committed" (they don't say "guilty" in traffic court) and the officer was not present to clarify, the judge filled in the blanks and made assumptions. He even said that out loud.

By the time my turn came I simply changed my plea to "committed". I explained that I had taken a day off from work and had driven three hours to get there to plead my case. I explained that while I had not committed this offense, it was very clear from the previous several hours worth of proceedings that that really did not matter in this court. I stated that very clearly everyone that walked into the courtroom was guilty simply because the officer said so. I said I thought that might be a little backwards from what I was expecting. While I was ready to raise sufficient doubt concerning the circumstances surrounding the stop, the officer was not there to fill in the blanks. With the judge doing that for him, I said I did not feel like wasting any more of our time.

Believe it or not, he was cordial about the whole thing. He even reduced the fine. I was shooting for contempt, but in retrospect that would have been too much work for the lazy bastard. Anyway, sorry to spin off on a tangent like that. Bottom line is you have no recourse even if they are simply wrong.