gregthehand wrote:Officers outside their jurisdiction can not enforce traffic violations. They have to be in their city if they are local police, or county if they are SO or Constables office. Also a deputy constable can write a traffic ticket anywhere in the county. They are supposed to write it for the precinct they are in at the time but that doesn't always happen. Also a lot of small towns next to big cities will write tickets out of their jurisdiction since 98% of the time people don't check or ask questions they just pay.
Officers can
enforce traffic outside their home areas, but may not
arrest for traffic violations outside their home areas.
gregthehand wrote:A related story and I won't give out the name of the city since this should still be an on-going investigation.
A young officer from a larger town, with less than one year on the job, in his personally owned white Dodge Charger with red and blue lights executed a traffic stop on a driver in a smaller neighboring town for speeding. The officer was not in uniform but was allowed to have red and blue lights on his car because he worked extra jobs for highway crews. The female driver did not immediately ID since the guy was not in uniform and not in a marked car. He basically got her out and cuffed her saying she was going down for failure to ID. Local police show up per officer's request and ask what's going on. He tells them what was what and they say un-hook her as you have no traffic jurisdiction here and therefore no reason to stop and ask her for ID anyhow. Big city officer gets mad but obliges.
The officer on scene said the big town cop had a young female passenger that he thinks the young officer was trying to impress. Why he didn't do it in his own city I have no idea. He was about ten minutes from being inside it's borders. Maybe he was confused and thought he was inside the larger city but after getting her out and cuffed realized he wasn't.
The larger cities internal affairs showed up the very next day and asked for the video and officer's report.
This guy was wrong on so many levels....