I’ve been watching a lot of videos on YouTube lately. Police stops. An officer pulls somebody over for speeding, or a broken tail light, or something equally forgettable, and twenty minutes later they’re face down on the shoulder under arrest for something serious.
The ticket is never what got them. It was a piece of paper.
I watched one recently that I haven’t been able to shake. An eighteen year old girl, drunk, screaming at the officers at the top of her voice for twenty solid minutes. Screaming that they were mistreating her while she was the only person on that roadside doing any mistreating. Kicking. Thrashing. Twenty minutes of it.
She was looking at a first DUI. That’s a bad night and an expensive lawyer and a year of inconvenience, and it doesn’t end anybody’s life. The narrator on that channel is a police officer and he looked up the disposition. She got twenty years.
Twenty years, because she couldn’t sit still on the side of a road for twenty minutes.
Why I respect police officers
I should say where I stand before I go further, because it colors everything else here. I have a great deal of respect for police officers, firefighters, and military people. They do something that’s plainly good for the rest of us, and they don’t get thanked for it nearly enough. They stand between ordinary people and the people who would happily do us harm. The simplest version of my position is this. It’s a hard job. It’s a job I wouldn’t be willing to do. That alone earns my respect before anything else enters into it. This isn’t theoretical for me either. A forest ranger got me off a mountain when I was lost. The fire department has pulled me out of a fire. Police officers have helped me in a handful of minor situations over the years, and I’ve never once had a bad encounter with any of them. Which doesn’t mean I’ve never been in trouble. When you’re young you’re dumb, and sometimes you speed.
Joshua Tree and the taser
I was driving through the area around Joshua Tree National Park, and the speed limit out there kept changing. Thirty-five. A mile later, forty-five. Then fifty-five. Then back down to thirty-five for no reason I could see from the road. So I picked fifty-five and held it. That was a decision I made on purpose and knew was a gamble.
An officer came the other way. I watched him pass, watched him slow, and watched him turn around, and I remember thinking very clearly, well, I’m nailed.
He put his lights on and there was nowhere to pull over safely, so he let me drive on to a rest stop a couple of miles ahead. Decent of him. And then I got out of the car.
He didn’t like that at all.
“Get back in the vehicle.”
He had his taser on me. So I got back in the vehicle, quickly, and put my hands where he could see them. He came up to the window.
“Don’t do that.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know the rules. I don’t get pulled over much.”
He laughed at that. Then he told me to keep a closer eye on the signs out there because they change constantly, and he gave me a warning and let me go. A warning. For fifty-five in a thirty-five, from a man who had a taser pointed at my chest thirty seconds earlier.
The school zone
The other one I think about happened in a school zone. Thirty-five limit. I was doing about fifty-five, maybe fifty-six, right on the edge of twenty over. He came to the window and didn’t waste any time.
“You know I could take you to jail for this. Twenty over the limit is a criminal offense.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I’m going to write you a ticket today because you’re being respectful about it. But I could put you in the back of this car right now. I do it sometimes.”
I’ve thought about that exchange for a long time. He wasn’t threatening me. He was telling me something true that I didn’t know, and he was telling me which way he’d decided to go and why.
What I took away from it’s stayed with me ever since. It’s not worth going to jail over a speeding ticket. Not ever, not for any reason, not to make any point.
| Stop | Behavior | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Drunk eighteen year old, first DUI (video) | Screamed and kicked for twenty minutes | Twenty years |
| Joshua Tree, fifty-five in a thirty-five | Got out of the car, then apologized | A warning |
| School zone, about twenty over | Stayed respectful | A ticket, not jail |
I drive conservatively now. Five over, most places, and dead on the limit in a school zone. Here in Florida the school zones drop to fifteen when children are present, and I do fifteen.
They are armed and they are allowed to use it
Something here seems to escape a certain kind of person.
That officer has a gun. He’s permitted to use it. He also has a taser and several other things, and he’s permitted to use those too. That’s a description of the job, and it’s the situation you’re standing in whether you like it or not. On top of that, police officers have qualified immunity. Suing an individual officer is difficult. You can go after the department or the municipality, and even that’s a long, expensive, exhausting process that eats years of your life. So why would anybody get in the face of a man in that position, who’s doing his job, over a piece of paper? Yes, there are jerks in that profession. There are jerks in every profession. I’ve met unpleasant doctors, unpleasant plumbers, and a fair number of unpleasant executives. The presence of a few bad ones doesn’t change what’s standing in front of you at that moment on that road.
Say less
There’s a lawyer on YouTube who keeps a sign on his desk that says don’t self-snitch. It’s the best legal advice I’ve ever seen fit on a desk ornament.
You have rights. They read you some of them if things go far enough, and you should know them well before that, because by the time somebody is reciting them to you the situation has already gone badly. One of those rights is to keep your mouth shut, and almost nobody uses it.
You don’t need to confess anything. You don’t need to explain yourself. A traffic stop conversation can be perfectly pleasant and still be very short.
“What can I do for you, officer?”
“You were speeding.”
“Got it. Thank you.”
Then you wait for the ticket. If he asks where you’ve come from, you came from home. Where’s that, and you tell him. Where are you headed, and you’re going to the mall. All of it ordinary and none of it volunteered.
There are things you do have to hand over. At a traffic stop you give your name and date of birth, your driver’s license, the vehicle registration, and proof of insurance.
That’s the transaction. Refusing those isn’t standing on principle, it’s a separate offense you’re adding to the one you already have, and it’s where a fair number of the people in these videos begin their bad evening.
Hand them over without an argument. Tell him where the documents are before you reach for them, because he doesn’t know what’s in your glovebox and neither of you wants that moment to go sideways.
Be aware of what is happening in that exchange, though. He’s not making small talk. He’s listening to how you form words and watching how your eyes track, deciding whether you’ve been drinking. That’s most of what those questions are for.
I have never had a drink in my life
Both of my parents were alcoholics. I made a decision very early because of that, and I’ve held to it without exception. I’ve never had a drink. Not one, not ever, not a sip to see what it tasted like. No drugs. No smoking. None of it, in my entire life.
Keep reading
My Life in Crazytown: What They Called Wrong With Me: Both my parents were alcoholics, and that decision about drinking was one of several I made early. The book is the longer account of what that house was like.
I’m not holding that up as virtue. I have my own bad habits and so does everybody, and mine have cost me things. I got lucky on this particular one, and the luck was having a reason sitting right in front of me at the age when most people are deciding these things for no reason at all.
I’ve also watched what the other answer does. My wife died from smoking. My stepson took his life apart with drinking and smoking both.
My parents, obviously. And past those three I could sit here and name people for a long time, people who were fine and then weren’t, and the throughline in nearly every case is a substance somebody kept putting into themselves after it stopped being a choice.
I’m not going to make that list here. It belongs in its own piece, or more likely several, and I’ll get to them.
But it’s why I think about that decision every time I watch one of these videos, because it’s nearly always the drunk ones. The drunk driver is the one who can’t follow a simple instruction.
The drunk driver is the one who starts screaming. He’s also the one who turns a bad night into a felony, because the thing that would normally stop a person from doing something that stupid has been switched off.
They were already endangering everybody else on that road. Then they compound it by handing themselves a sentence.
All of it ends up on film
The other thing about these videos is that they’re watched. Hundreds of thousands of views. Some of them millions.
So that eighteen year old girl is serving her sentence, and that’s only part of it. Her worst twenty minutes are permanently available to anybody with a search box, and they’ll be for the rest of her life and probably longer than that.
Everybody has a camera now. Every officer has a body camera, every dashboard has one, every bystander has a phone already recording. Anything stupid you do in public is going to exist as a file somewhere, forever, and you have no say in who watches it.
Which seems like a reasonable argument for not doing stupid things in public.
What it comes down to
Be respectful of other people. That’s the whole of it.
Even when you don’t like them. Even when you think they’re wrong. Even when you’re certain they’re wrong and you can prove it. That’s the hardest case and the one where it matters most.
If you disagree with that ticket, there’s a place to fight it. That place is a courtroom, with a judge, at a scheduled time, where you get to speak and be heard and where nobody is armed. It’s not the shoulder of a road at eleven at night with a man who has been on shift for nine hours and doesn’t know what’s in your car.
Take the ticket. Say thank you. Fight it later if you want to fight it.
You’ll keep your record, your money, your dignity, and quite possibly the next twenty years of your life.
The ticket was never the problem. What happens in the twenty minutes after it is.