TexasCHLforum.com

Jusme wrote:

thelurker wrote:Well I was hoping I open this thread and discover the ticket was completely unjustified and I'd just have to mention this thread to the judge and all would be good. Looks like I'm on the hook. The thing is that I rarely speed because diesel is too expensive and I am not generally in a hurry anyways.

Enjoyed some of the posts here...quite funny. Guess I need to post a sign at this there so they can't use that location any longer. Can you perform a citizen's arrest on a police officer??

The job of the police officer running radar is to gain compliance. If their radar triggers your detector and you slow down, they have done their job. If you post a sign warning other drivers and they slow down, the same thing has been accomplished. If people see a patrol car, or police motorcycle, and slow down, again, their job has been done. LEO get no extra money for writing tickets, despite what many claimed must have been true for me. Usually, they are assigned an area, or stretch of road, to patrol, due to complaints from residents/business owners in that area, or a large number of accidents in that area. You would be surprised at how often the ones who called in the complaints were caught speeding.

You can take a defensive driving course, or get deferred adjudication and it won't go on your driving record.

While true, there are many towns that use the deferred adjudication process as an additional revenue enhancer. That is one of the reasons our City Council is very cognizant of the image it creates. There is a small town about 40 miles from us, just off I-35 between Waco and DFW that runs radar on 35 and issues speeding tickets left and right. They hand out a "menu" sheet with the citation listing all the possible fines for various offenses and speeds. At the bottom of the front page of the "menu" in bold larger type print, it says: "SEE REVERSE SIDE FOR DISMISSAL OPTION". They don't even sugar coat it by calling it deferred adjudication. It very plainly states that "for an additional fee of $50.00 this citation will be dismissed and will not appear on your driving record". They generate a LOT of money, property taxes stay low, and people hate them.

Liberty wrote:Revenue enhancing is Revenue enhancing by any other name.

As a business owner and a City Councilman, I have had our department officers parking on my commercial properties on the main highway through town on the weekends, running radar without asking permission. Under a previous Police Chief, he was encouraging officers to write tickets and generate revenue. I was at office catching up on paperwork early one Easter Sunday morning around 8:30am, and noticed a squad car pull into my property across the highway from my office and park up under a canopied area which hid the car from view pretty effectively. A few minutes later I observed him pull out rapidly with lights flashing and he stopped a vehicle about 2 blocks up the highway. I got in my truck and drove past them as he was writing out a citation and saw it was young family in "Sunday dress", probably on their way to church or family get together. When he pulled back into my property I walked over and asked him how fast they were going (it's a 30mph limit in that 5 block area then changes to 40), and he said they were going 37mph. I asked him if he issued a warning or citation and he said it was a speeding ticket. I asked him to put himself in their position and how it would make him feel if he was driving through a town, with his wife and kids, going to meet their family for church or a family gathering and got a speeding ticket like that. He replied "probably not very good I guess". I told him considering the fact that they weren't endangering anyone and there was light traffic, he could have created a positive impression for our town, by giving them a written or verbal warning and wishing them "Happy Easter", and they would have told their family and friends about how nicely he was treated in our town. Instead, he will be talking about us running a "speed trap" for out of town travelers on Easter Sunday, and that will hurt our town much more than the $75 revenue will help it. I told him to tell the rest of the officers and the Chief, that they were not to use any of my property to run radar unless they asked my permission in the future. The Mayor and the Council discussed the volume of tickets being written with the Chief and told him we did NOT want to get a reputation as a "speed trap" and to tone it down. We had the same discussion the following month, when the report showed even more tickets written that month. He argued with us that he was the Chief, and how the department operated was his decision to make. At the next council meeting, we terminated him and got a new Chief.