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I used to not think of policeman as road tax collectors. However, my opinion of them has been slowly changing.

My dad is in the army, and because of this we moved a lot growing up, so I did a lot of driving around in out of state cars. During my undergrad and now my graduate studies I have also ended up driving around with a lot of students with cars registered in other states. Police officers seem to like to pray on out of state vehicles, they must seem like easy pickings.

Although I have never been given a ticket personally (I am a very careful driver) I have been in the passenger seat a number of times when tickets have been unfairly given out.

The clearest example of this is several years ago when I was traveling with several friends during Spring Break. We were driving from Flordia back up to New York and my friend was going about 5 mph over the speed limit, but we were clearly the slowest car on the road, and getting passed (and in some cases honked at / given the finger) for slowing up traffic.

Well we got pulled over by a police officer in I believe North Carolina (maybe south? the states kinda blur together on long drives). It was one of the states were work zones aren't work zones on weekends (when no work is going on), and he got pulled over in a work zone (but on Saturday) and the officer gave my friend a postdated ticket for 20 over in a work zone. $600.

The officer actually said "Boy, you are a long way from home, I'd like to see you come back here to contest this." and laughed at us. That is, he did after he kept us waiting on the side of the road for 2 hours+. Well we had just arrived in country Friday, and if you did the math we would have had to have been going about 200mph the whole way to have been pulled over when the officer said the stop had occurred, so my friend got a lawyer and it was reduced to "expired vehicle inspection" (on a 2 week old car?). Last I heard though his state had already been told about the ticket so he still had a bunch of points on his license the lawyer was trying to remove.

From this and about a half dozen other similar (but less costly) events in the past couple of year I have really started to get a bad taste in my mouth about police who see tickets, especially from out of state drivers, as a convenient source of revenue.

Especially as he said / she said always seems to favor the officer and not the public.

-paridel

I won't say there aren't a##hole cops out there.

Some of what you see is driven by the Municipality they work for (Not a good reason, but they need to keep their jobs too.)

You appear to be reasonable in your assessment and I can see how you came to it. I cannot speak for the officers that gave you that impression. I can only speak for myself and the people I work with.

My beef with some is they have the "Cops are Nazi's" mentality as a default.

I hope some reasonable discussion between us can help you see another side to the story