Flashwing

I got myself my first ticket in 2 years a few days ago here in Phoenix headed home from work at 6 am in the morning. I was headed north on a major highway and a guy in the left lane refused to pass or move over so I passed him in the middle lane and got back over. I got paced doing 80 in a 65. Mostly the reason he stopped me was no doubt because of the aggressive manner I appeared to be changing lanes. Like speeddemon, I just took it as payment for enjoying the car.

I know we all talk about having the worst drivers in our respective states but Phoenix certainly has it's share of seriously dangerous people. I've found that driving aggressive gets me noticed and a noticed vehicle is one you don't often run into, turn in front of or merge into. I can say I'm 26 and the RX8 is the second vehicle I've ever owned and my first is still parked back east in my parents garage.

Still that philosophy of driving doesn't always jive with the local police and sometimes you have to pay the piper. The police can't make exceptions for me just because I feel like I'm a good driver, have a car capable of handling high speed moves without losing control or even that I think the speed limits are bogus.

Speeddmon I really feel for you though...I used to FLY down I-465 in Indy going home from Indiana University. I can only imagine the trouble I'd get into with the RX8 if I was back in Indiana.

Mike06

LOL!

i completely agree with you man...like i have been saying in so many posts now, it is one thing for an officer to pull over and cite a speeder that is blatantly disregarding the law and is danger to himself or others,

BUT its a COMPLETELY different story when the officer is just out hunting for victims and for a quick ticket to fill his quota for the month.

if you get pulled over and cited for going 5 mph over the speed limit, is that justicE? if you get pulled over and cited for going for going 75-80 in a 65 highway where EVERYONE is going at that speed and it considered the flow of traffic, is the officer just picking out a poor, weak victim from the herd for an unreasonable ticket or is the officer really looking to "teach a dastardly speeder a lesson" and uphold justice?

it seems like all of you are just siding with the officers in this thread, and see them as something like god's little angels with halo's on their head that could never be succeptable to corruption. just take a moment or two to think about all that i have said and you will realize a thing or two...

Socket7

The problem with the police is that you will only ever hear about the corrupt ******** on the force. You will never hear about all of the officers who are dedicated to doing their job well and serving the public interest, because police men doing their job properly is not news worthy.

If you can't get a ticket for 5 over the limit dismissed in court thats your problem not the cops. "well judge, my speedometer has an error range of +/- 3 mph, and when calibrated properly, so does a radar gun. So even if the officer did calibrate his radar gun before going out on patrol there is enough mechanical error involved that it is quite possible I was in fact going the limit. Which is why I am here contesting my ticket, because I was driving the limit."

One of my friends once got a ticket dismissed by saying "there was a tractor trailor between me and the cop, and I don't think that radar passes through solid objects." The magistrate looked at him a moment and said "no, no it does not work that way" and dismissed the ticket.

dothackRAVE

I have more of a problem with speed limits being artificially low sometimes. That, and I think we should let Darwin deal with people who can't drive, but insist on going faster than they are comfortable with.

Mike06

i agree with you to a certain extent...

i do believe if you get cited for going 5 over that it is entirely your responsibility and DUTY as a citizen of america to contest such a ticket in court.

but for a police officer to have the nerve to give you such a ticket like that in the first place?!?!

corruption at its prime.
even though i'm sure that some of you would argue that the police offer did a noble, heroic act in giving you that ticket.

usmc320

I wouldn't call it corruption. Petty maybe.

Mike06

call it what you want. bottom line: its NOT justice.

usmc320

As socket7 said if you can't get a 5mph over ticket dropped, that's your problem.

You are still speeding though. Think of it this way: If no one got a ticket for going let's say 7 over, then everyone would go at least 7 over. Then people would say if I can go 7 over, why not 10? Then if we accept that as the normal, why not 15? Wouldn't make sense to even have a speed limit then.

So, while those officers do seem petty to the general population, without the fear of getting a ticket for barely speeding, no one would pay attention to their speed at all. It would be a waste of time.

rx8speeddmon

iTrader: (4)

lol....and that is exactly where it was. I still think this was a crappy ticket to get, because I was going with traffic, not tailgating, not lane changing, just driving along in the far left lane. I know complaining about it on here is not going to do much except for make me feel alittle better by venting off. Thanks for listening/reading everyone!!

Machiavelli

Not even petty. Calling it pettiness implies that there's a personal element to it. But when you get tagged for going 5 mph over (or less) it's usually just the business of raising revenue.

When there's a legitimate basis for the speed trap, whether it be something like a dangerous stretch of road or just a simple, general desire to slow people down to appropriate speeds, getting nabbed is easier to swallow. You got busted. Take your medicine.

But when the purpose has little or nothing to do with the public welfare, then it starts feeling like those we are paying taxes to protect us are instead abusing us. I'm not talking about individual officers, but rather the politicians that send them out with nothing more in mind than filling the town coffers.

Just a few examples from here in Ohio:

-- The suburb that has about 200 feet of I-71 running through their town (yes, we allow the locals to patrol the Interstates). They have no on ramp in their town. They have no off ramp. They do have an over pass, though, and they park under it constantly. Per the last census, the town has a total population of 117 (I'm not sure if that includes cats and dogs). It's an urban area, snuggled up angainst Cleveland, and I have no idea why it still exists. It has no tax base, so it taxes the local motorists.

-- The suburb that has a major east-west corridor that is 35 mph all the way through, except for a one block stretch where it briefly goes to 25 mph. There's no school there, and there's no home for the blind. There's no curve or dip. The locals sit there there and pull over the unwary, often having one officer stand with a radar gun who points at you to pull over whereupon one of a bevy of cruisers parked on a side street will pull out to write your ticket.

-- The City of Cleveland's practice of avoiding the whole messy, inconvenient court date / burden of proof thing by having a car parked on the side of the road with a radar gun pointed out the back window while a bored officer sits there with the sports page. If the semi-unmanned radar gun decides you are speeding, he pushes a button and your car is photographed as you pass and you get a ticket in the mail 60 days or so later. It's a bit like a mobile platform for those red light cameras, except they get you for speed. You probably don't even remember being there by that time, much less how fast you were going, and decide to contest. When you go to the "hearing" you find a drowsy civil servant who tells you that you owe $100 and can tell you nothing about the circumstances or even the name of the officer who was sitting in the car. It's a "civil fine" so due process does not apply. It's o.k. though, because you can appeal by filing a civil lawsuit. The filing fee for the appeal is $100.

My point? I guess it's that no one has the right to complain if they are genuinely caught speeding and that a large part of the time police are doing us all a favor by keeping our lead feet in check. But it's becoming all to common that politicians are turning cops into glorified mobile meter maids to shake down motorists to fill the public coffers. If you happen to know any real cops, the ones who actually do unusual things like, oh . . . say . . . arrest actual criminals, they'll tell you that they don't like being put in this position.

ken-x8

Then there are the "abusive driver fees" in Virginia. Put into place overtly as a money maker, after which the politicians claimed it was a safety measure.

Traffic deaths in Virginia reached a new record high after these were in place.

A lot of police officers under-wrote tickets to avoid crossing the threshold into offenses that triggered the fees. No "make money for the state" attitude on their part. Just empathy for the drivers.

Ken

Mike06

yes, that could be one possible reason that you are pulled over and cited for going 5 mph over the speed limit? But is it the only legitimate reason cops have been known to do this?

Not a chance.

Just to name a few,

1) the officer could simply be trying to raise the count of the number of tickets he's given in the month, to meet or exceed his quota. There's no such thing as a ticket quota for officers you say? ohhh boy! if you want to take it at that angle then thats a whole other argument i could show and prove to you in a different thread.

2) while it may sound absurd, he could simply just be having a bad day and end up over-stepping and abusing the power he has been given the by state by venting out his frustration or rage on traffic victims. this may seem like an exaggeration on my part, but sadly its not...we all know that much of the level of how you are charged and to what extent you are prosecuted depends solely on the officer's mood at that given time and if he wants to nail you or not with every conveivable far-fetched charge that he can muster up at the time.

while i agree with you that yes, politicians can and are all to commonly the source of this corruption in our traffic laws, i think that you would have to be playing ignorant to truly believe that officers have never also been the master minds behind acts such as these. not to raise revenue for the government obviously mind you, but to profit themselves, in promotions or salary raises by filling and exceeding their ticket quotas for the month.

dmc27

Not what it seems like to me. Most are just saying that, like any other aspect of society, there are good & bad.

I got a ticket recently, yet I still think very highly of the cop that gave it to me. He was professional & nice, and didn't write the ticket for tint ($300) and no front plate ($75) which he pulled me over for in the first place. So the state revenue is not a big factor in his choice.

However, I will agree with you that the D-bag cops (the bad ones, mind you, not all cops) are more likely to pull over younger drivers. They can be petty, foolish, and I would even give you the "corrupted by power" with some of these choice tools.

The cop that pulled me, in my opinion, was looking for an entitled punk kid driver. He got me, and once he realized it, sent me on my way w/a minor ticket which I will now try to have dismissed. But I don't consider him a bad guy b/c of it - especially since the punk *** entitled kids in my town have managed to kill 4 buddies over the last 2 years in various auto (drunk driving) and boating (drunk boating) accidents.

RotaryP7

I wish speed limits didn't exist..

passtheapathy

Hahaha, I'm with Mike06 on this one...I'm 19 and I get a shitload of trouble from cops because of my 8. I mean hell, a few weeks I accidentally made a U-turn at an empty intersection where I didn't know it was illegal, and a cop making a left turn reversed and gunned it to follow me. He literally SCOURED my neighborhood with his searchlight looking for me until he finally found me safely parked in front of my house where he proceeded to be a typical worthless cop and give me a ticket.

Nothing ever really happens in my town because it's just a bunch of rich people that don't cause any trouble. And of course, people doing the most minor of traffic "violations" get to take the fall.

Summary? **** patrol officers.

I have the utmost respect for any high ranking officer that goes out on calls like domestic abuse, vandalism, assualt, burglary or anything similar. That's doing the public a real service. But patrol officers that just look to nail speeders, people rolling stop signs at empty intersections, people accidentally making "unsafe" u-turns, those officers are the scum of the earth.

They're uneducated losers looking to boss people around in their old age just like they probably did to kids in high school.

Hahaha, you guys are probably so pissed after reading that, huh?

crafted_soul

You guys are saying you got pulled over for doing 30 - 60 over speed limit. But check this out.....I got pulled over for doing 70 in 60 zone. Pretty lame..eh?
I decided to fight the ticket and won! ha! ..I didn't have to pay anything. The charges were dropped. Nothing went on my record. I was home free.
I thanked the judge though....I was lucky to have a super nice judge!

So if you get a traffic ticket....don't just admit and pay it! Fight it!! You have nothing to lose. Even it's obvious that it was your fault. So..fight the ticket!!!!

j67345

yeah, waste the taxpayers money fighitng a ticket for going 30 over the limit! great idea!

maverick02

Ahhh.. speeding tickets .. Fortunately, I can say I havent received one in 8 years. Only got one speeding ticket ever a month after getting my license.. the next day, i was online ordering an escort passport radar detector and have since never had a problem. Of course they only help so much with cops being able to turn on their guns in a split second and in the past year, I see them on the highways sticking a radar gun out the window.. I really h ate LIDAR. But.. I more or less know the areas they hide and I'm less likely to speed at night especially when I'm alone on the roads.. I also don't go more than maybe 5 mph over the speed limit in residential areas... too many hiding spots and they're always driving around. In the end, I suggest you get a high quality radar detector and use it as an aid.. they're useless against lidar and many cops carefully flip their radar on for a split second when they see you approaching.. by the time your detector beeps, you're caught... so it's just an aid.. it's great when the cops aim their guns at cars in front of you so you get the warning, but if they hit you first, you're caught. Had a few close calls over the years but so far, 8 years and no ticket!

dmc27

Not pissed. Just curious exactly how one "accidentally" makes a U-turn?

dothackRAVE

I love Indiana. U-turns are legal. I love Illinois. Everyone drives crazy there.