A Police State (or Safety Nazis, or Protecting you from yourself)

And one I wrote that pissed off a few Police friends of mine.
I'm sorry, I understand what the true purpose of traffic enforcement is and it's only about 35% high and mighty concern for your safety. The rest is merely a way for governments to get money.

Read the article and you'll see my point of view. You don't have to agree, but you should wear your damn seat belt and maybe you won't get pulled over.



A Police State
The never-ending pursuit of safety

It seems that every spring I write about the increased police presence on the highways. Once the sun starts warming the ground, everyone spends more time in their cars and more time on the roads. It’s prime opportunity for the Police to swarm around and impose their own brand of taxation on driving by protecting us from ourselves in a relentless pursuit of safety.

What is safety? Can we truly ever achieve safety? You can be sitting in a chair in your own house and not be truly safe. In all facets of life, the only thing we can do is to try and behave in a fashion that affords us the greatest amount of safety.

We wear shoes so our feet are safe from sharp objects on the ground. We wear gloves in the snow so our hands are safe from frostbite. We make these personal decisions every day, but for some reason when we are on the highways, the government must make these decisions for us.

Through the relentless legislative process we now have a myriad of laws that impose safety upon us. Our cars are now 500 to 1000 pounds heavier than twenty years ago due to safety regulations. We are all forced, by the power of the Federal Government, to wear seat belts, again in a quest to make us safe.

What amazes me is how the Government uses this notion of safety and ideology that everything is “for the children” in order to strip away our privacy and subject us to searches and questioning by the Police all because we decided to go for a drive.

The next step simply must be random and unannounced Police inspections of our private homes. I know that I have items I could trip over in my bathroom. I also have some tennis shoes on my basement steps and surely that’s not safe. If the Police are allowed to impose safety upon us in our private vehicles, then why is it so silly to believe they aren’t headed for our private homes?

The truth is that these checkpoints are just another way to collect the various road taxes for the Government. The cars must pass through a gauntlet of officers all with a ticket book in hand. Even if you have your seat belt fastened, you still might have a burned out parking light or a dead inspection sticker. If you didn’t have to drive by these officers on display, they might have had to actually do Police work in order to nab you for those offenses.

Sure, I want to get drunk drivers off the road, but these checkpoints only catch drunks by accident. The drunk has to be on that road at that time in order to get caught. The news coverage always says that there was one or two DUI arrests but multiple tickets written for traffic infractions.

Those tickets are a gold mine for the municipality that writes them. It’s so profitable; I don’t understand why they don’t just do it every day. If these checkpoints pass constitutional scrutiny for occasional use, then why can’t they just set them up at the exit of Southridge and catch each and every driver that doesn’t have a current inspection sticker or bad registration.

These officers have a legitimate desire to have you belted up. They are the ones that must come upon your crash scene and they would much rather find your body (breathing or not) firmly secured to the seat. It gets messy when you are half way ejected from the car and none of these officers want to clean up the mess or inform your next of kin.

Everyone should wear seatbelts but why is there a law telling us to do it. It’s as if we are all 7 years old and our parents are telling us to not touch the stove when it’s hot. As adults there is nobody in our house now telling us to not touch the hot stove, but for some reason the Government gets in our car and tells us to buckle up.

Seat belts are an absolute necessity and if someone doesn’t buckle up they are making a horrible decision that could shorten or end their lives. Not wearing your seat belt could break the heart of your family members or children when they find out you have been killed. This is all very horrible stuff, but I could also disembowel myself with a steak knife but there is no federal law requiring me to have dull knives that are unable to break human flesh. If I am stupid enough to endanger myself by being unbelted in a car or by juggling steak knives, then it is my business to do so.

Just how did we allow the Police to get in our cars with us? It’s none of the business of the Federal Government whether I wear a safety belt. I agree, it’s the business of the Government if I drink while driving, but safety belts are not on that level.

In the past two weeks I have gone through a DUI Checkpoint and a Seat Belt Safety Awareness Checkpoint.

At the DUI Checkpoint, luckily I was in a completely legal car and completely sober. I was waived through and was only delayed for 90 seconds. Sure, I was visually examined by the Police and my automobile had to pass all their visual tests. If I had anything questionable about my vehicle I surely would have been pulled and ticketed. Without the checkpoint, the Police would have had to do genuine detective work and observe my vehicle in the wild in order to write me a ticket. It’s sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. If all the cars are going to drive right past you, you can enforce the vehicle code from a recliner.

The seat belt checkpoint was far more comical. It was Thursday at approx. 10:30pm and I was on my way to Wal-Mart for some impulse grocery purchases. The comical thing about this evening was that I had just licensed the vehicle I was driving. This particular vehicle had been in storage for three years and until that very afternoon didn’t have current registration.

On the prior weekend, my daily driver suffered a blown head gasket. After 3 days of procrastination, and borrowing something to drive, I decided to purchase insurance for my other vehicle and I headed to the DMV on that Thursday afternoon.

I left the DMV at 5:35pm went home and affixed my current license plate sticker. The car was now fully insured and registered in the State of West Virginia. The only problem was the dead State Inspection Sticker, which expired in 12/05, and a windshield suffering a crack from a rock. That blue sticker stood out like a neon sign on Las Vegas Boulevard, but I had already ordered a windshield and it would be here in 4 days.

I spent the evening cleaning the car and generally making it road worthy. Later I decided to drive the car for the first time on the public roads in three years. I was going to head to Wal-Mart for the dual purpose of seeing how the car did and to get some groceries.

Here’s where I made the conscious decision to be a law breaker. I was setting out on a criminal conspiracy to knowingly operate a motor vehicle with an expired inspection sticker. It was heady stuff for a law abiding citizen like me, but I figured that under the cloak of darkness, the chances of an officer seeing that blue 2005 sticker was quite small.

So, off I went and not 5 miles down the road I found myself in the clutches of a City of Charleston Seat Belt Safety Checkpoint. Damn, I was as nervous as if I was 9 beers into a 12 pack. I envisioned my car being towed and me being taken away in cuffs for such an overtly expired State Inspection sticker.

First off, I had probably a quarter of a mile of notice that there was a checkpoint ahead. There was even a flashing sign warning of a seat belt checkpoint. It’s during this period when they can’t yet see you that any moron that wasn’t previously wearing their seat belt SHOULD PUT IT ON. I can’t imagine anyone driving up to one of those checkpoints without their seat belt buckled. How stupid must you be to drive into a gauntlet of enforcement and flashing signs without quietly fastening the belt.

Anyway, so the officers are arranged about 20 feet apart. As I approached I could see the gleam in their eyes. They had spied a law breaker. That bright blue sticker might as well have a flashing light of guilt.

The first officer told me to pull forward and speak with the last officer on my left.

As I passed the other Officers, each of them were intently staring at my windshield. I felt like there was a bloody machete and a confession right there in plain view.

I stopped and smiled at the officer that they had selected for my inquisition. He told me that I would need to pull on the other side of the flashing pylons so we could talk further.

I pulled out my temporary registration from the DMV showing that I purchased the license sticker a mere 5 hours ago. I also handed him the, fresh off the fax, proof of car insurance for this vehicle.

Sounding like many criminals I have seen on Cops, I started vomiting out what I believed to be a perfectly rational defense for the expired sticker. I needed transportation (due to my other vehicle being dead), I had to order a windshield, and I was only driving the car tonight to test it out after being in storage for so long.

The young officer gave me that same look that we all see on Cops. The story was irrelevant. I was breaking the law and my colorful story didn’t mean a damn thing to him.

He took my paperwork and left me alone in the car to ponder all the prison movies that I had ever seen.

During the excruciating period when he was away, I had time to watch the officers at work tending to east bound traffic. Cars would approach and the officers would yell out to each other like they were claiming women in a bar. “I got the black truck, you get the red sedan”. These officers were clutching their tri-fold safety brochure in one hand but their ticket books were in the other. Under the ruse of passing out these silly pamphlets, one officer was checking out the front half of your car while others were inspecting the rear. You are forced to drive through so slow that the officers, standing elevated on the median, are afforded a clear, and sometimes flashlight aided, view right into your vehicle as you pass by.

All those pesky constitutional issues about unreasonable search and seizure, self-incrimination and probable cause are whisked away when you pass through one of these checkpoints.

My fresh faced interrogator finally returned with something for me to sign. Thankfully, this man had seen fit to allow this scoff-law off with a WARNING CITATION.

He had no other comment, other than to say that I could “tear it up and throw it away”. So, I didn’t get arrested and the gracious Charleston Police Department didn’t hit me with a costly tax on my law breaking drive through town on that fateful Thursday evening.

I spent a few more angst riddled days until my windshield came in. I ducked the cops like a parole violator. A simple trip to a friend’s home off of Edgewood took about ten extra minutes due to several impromptu turns to avoid a face to face encounter with the roaming police cruisers.

I don’t know how any true criminal could sleep at night. It’s a virtual Police State on the highways. With these Federal money grants in that elusive pursuit of safety, I think we are all going to be subject to more and more of these unreasonable checkpoints.

We will never be truly safe on the highways and I am simply of the belief that these checkpoints are misguided. The highly trained Police Officers are wasted while standing along a highway. Those 20 officers manning that checkpoint would have been able to cover miles and miles of highway doing true Police work.

Go forth and drive safely. Be nice to your Police officers.