Case in point: Cops are our 1st Judges.
We often don't think about the extreme amount of power a cop is given. I am going to use a couple of recent examples from my own life. About a month ago, I crept out a little way into a busy intersection and when the light turned yellow, and then red I was already blocking traffic and had to move on through. A police officer following behind me stopped me and took down all my information and then gave me an unofficial warning and no citation. Now, what I mean by power, is that he could have decided there was probable cause, searched my vehicle and even incarcerated me if he had even the slightest provocation. He was my first judge, by deciding to let me go he made a judgement and I was found innocent. Not by a jury of my peers, but by a single individual with a relatively limited amount of training. (Now, I have several friends in Law Enforcement and I am not shorting any officer of the law, but they aren't required to have even a Bachelor's degree in most states just Police Academy Training initially)
Why did this guy let me go? Who knows, He liked my looks, I was polite, I didn't have any recent infractions, or he was just to busy, something came up, he didn't feel like it. He obviously judged that I had broken a law or he wouldn't have even stopped me, or maybe he was just gambling that I would have expired registration or insurance or something else.
Another case in point,
Just two weeks ago in a different city, I was pulled over but this time instead of a warning I got a ticket, why the difference, was this guy behind quota, was he mad at his kids, or did he just not like my looks, and then on top of this instead of giving me a ticket for going 47 in a 35 mile Zone he has the autonomy and authority to alter that to 40 in a 35 and still wrote that the radar clocked me at 47 on the citation. The technology is trusted and assumed to be correct, what am I going to say to argue with the radar? But still why does this one individual have so much authority. It's a lot of authority, particularly when you look at the system closer. When the ticket is first issued I have the choice of paying the ticket ($82.00) or paying a fine and enrolling in traffic school for a fee ($22.00 + $60.00= $82.00) This amount is just enough to really cause some economic pain (and I actually think if someone is going to be punished it should hurt) but small enough to not be worth fighting. If I do fight it, I am going to have to take of a full day of work and go down to the court and then if I lose I still have to pay the ticket. Am I going to gamble that the cop won't show to testify and it will get thrown out, especially when I know for sure I am losing a day's pay, probably not. Plus, If I chose to fight the ticket I forfeit the right to have the citation erased off my record by attending traffic school. The system is structured so that an individual police officer has the authority and autonomy to be judge, jury, executioner and in this case fee collector since the police department gets the $60.00 traffic school fee.
It looks like a corrupt system to me. The cop decides whom to ticket and whom not to ticket and then his program is benefited by the fees collected and the fees are structured so that to fight it is just risky enough not to be worth it. It gets even worse when confiscated money's and goods are kept by the police departments. See a recent series on NPR for further info.
Dirty Money
Flawed? Yeah, I think so!!! So Watch out!
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