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Police departments protect and serve, but it’s often their own interests
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
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As children, I’m sure most of us were taught that the cops are our friends. As adults, however, only the most naive among us fail to realize that our state and local police forces’ preoccupation with self-preservation results in continual attempts to generate revenue at the expense of law-abiding citizens.
Speed traps. DUI checkpoints. Red-light cameras. Federal ‘‘Click It or Ticket” programs. These are merely a handful of ways the Nanny State masquerades as our protector, all the while cleaning up at the bank of new taxes they like to call ‘‘fines” and increasingly trampling our liberties in the process.
On Monday morning, June 19, I encountered three speed traps along my 10-mile commute to work. As a resident of Calvert County who works in St. Mary’s County, I’m afforded the luxury of encountering two counties’ worth of such traps.
I passed a deputy on Route 4 shooting radar from one of the brand-spankin’-new unmarked Suburbans we’ve recently purchased for Calvert County, wondering why in the world the sheriff just didn’t go whole-hog and get Hummers like the guys in ‘‘CSI: Miami” have. As I approached the bridge heading to St. Mary’s County, there they were: more than half a dozen cruisers clustered in a small field, deputies in neon green vests licking their chops as they awaited instruction from Mr. Suburban.
But it gets worse. Less than a quarter-mile from my office off Route 235, five St. Mary’s County⁄state patrol cars were stopped in the right-hand lane— simply sitting there, clogging an otherwise navigable lane that I and others must use to turn into the Exploration Park complex — even though an entire field is available right off the shoulder. As a result, commuters weren’t just reflexively tapping the brakes as they encountered the speed trap; they were forced to swerve around the cruisers, changing lanes and unnecessarily increasing the risk of accident. If our cops must harass those of us who contribute most to the tax base (and pretty much by default commit the least crime as a whole), they can at the very least stay off the road while they do it.
Our police departments protect and serve, all right. It’s just unfortunate that so often it’s their own interests they’re protecting and serving.
Trevor J. Bothwell, Dowell
