I was all set for my day in court.
It came about on a Saturday night in January 2012. At just before midnight I hopped onto my motorscooter and pottered down to Vons to get some juice. I didn’t think anything of the police car parked curbside at the three-way stop near my home. That is, until my return, when, after making a left turn, when I was startled by a quick siren blast.
I’ve been stopped for alleged moving violations perhaps a dozen times in my life. Most of the time I knew exactly why I was being stopped, for one simple reason: I was guilty. But this was one of those times when I had literally no idea what was gong on. To my knowledge I had not done anything wrong—and had been fully aware of the police presence, to boot.
In short order I was told I had blown through the stop sign—”at 25 miles per hour,” the officer said. I was shocked, because that was patently untrue. I would never have taken that relatively tight turn at anywhere near that speed even were I oblivious to the stop sign there (which I wasn’t). And so when the officer returned after running my driver’s license and registration, I had my recorder going and queried him further, already preparing to fight this ticket in court.
“You say I was going 25 miles per hour?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “Well, at least 20 miles per hour. I was surprised, because you didn’t even slow down.”
Again, this was simply not true. But the officer certainly didn’t present like someone on a power trip, so this was all a bit confusing. The citation I received read that my speed was “< 15 mph,” which meant that three times within the space of five minutes a detail of the officer’s account had changed.
I also couldn’t help noticing that he had not bothered to ask me whether I’d had anything to drink—a question police often ask during such prime DUI time (like midnight on Saturday) just to hear how the driver responds, never mind after seeing what most would consider a reckless maneuver. The reason seemed clear to me: whatever the officer saw, clearly it was not reckless, so he had no cause to inquire about whether I’d been drinking.
Although the officer was perfectly polite, I felt wronged, and before I even walked through my front door I was going over what I would say to the judge when I appeared in court. The one piece of information I didn’t have was whether his police unit was equipped with the type of dashboard camera that automatically activates whenever the siren and lights are activated, recording (by some miracle of technology I don’t fully understand) what took place 30 seconds before the siren sounded. I hoped so, because it would verify that the officer’s account of what had happened was inaccurate. But whatever the case, I was in a fightin’ mood. A couple of weeks later I received the mailed confirmation of the citation, and I took the first steps toward justice. Shortly afterwards a court date was set.
But as the day I approached and I reviewed my testimony, I realized I had one big problem: I could not swear to the fact that I had come to a full and complete stop. Never mind respect for traffic laws or concern for my fellow motorists: I care way too much about my own well being ever to drive recklessly. But we all know what a “California stop” is, and we all find occasion when such a maneuver seems to us absolutely safe. There was no denying that sometimes I came to a full stop at stop signs, and sometimes I did not, my only strong determining criterion being safety.
What happened on this one occasion? I simply did not know. I certainly hadn’t blown through the stop sign at 25, 20, or even 15 mph; but a judge might grant me the point and yet find that I had failed to provide sufficient evidence that I had not committed the violation in question. The best I could do was call part of the officer’s account into question; I could not honestly deny the infraction itself.
In theory, traffic court is just like a criminal proceeding: the burden of proof is on the prosecution. But in practice, when it’s your word against that of one or two police officers—which is all the evidence available in the majority of alleged moving violations—you’re going to be hard-pressed to get a judge to rule in your favor. And perhaps that’s not entirely unreasonable. After all, in theory a police officer is unbiased in such a case, whereas the bias of the defendant is self-evident.
There is, of course, the longstanding question of ticket quotas, which are illegal but widely believed by motorists to exist nonetheless. Police generally deny such claims, but in 2011 10 Los Angeles Police Department officers sued the LAPD for being harassed when they did not meet ticket quotas, a lawsuit that came on the heels of a jury awarding two veteran LAPD officers $2 million for departmental retaliation against the pair for complaining about just such a quota system.
While I don’t doubt that these quotas have sometimes existed (whether at the LBPD or not I haven’t the slightest idea), my personal experience would not help prove the case. As I said, most of the times when I have been stopped (the majority coming way back when I drove a car), I was guilty of the offense—and yet more often than not I was let off with a warning. Not what you would expect from officers trying to meet ticket quotas.
But meeting such quotas probably would not be difficult. At a local homeowners’ association meeting exactly one a year ago, a LBPD lieutenant publicly averred that, with the myriad of potential violations in the vehicle code, it is almost always the case that an officer would not need to follow a driver very far to find something he could cite (to be clear, he was not saying this was LBPD practice), provided he were to attend more to the letter of the law than its spirit.
That was the dilemma I found myself confronting. Had I violated the letter of the law? I just couldn’t say.
The letter and spirit of the law perfectly coincide when it comes to testimony under oath, and it was simply not an ethical option for me to walk into court and swear that I had come to a complete stop. Not only would I have been perjuring myself—because even if I really had come to a complete stop, I did not clearly remember doing so—I would have also, in effect, been calling the officer a liar. Accusing someone of lying is serious business in any case; it seems to me that much more serious when the accusation is made against a police officer, even implicitly. I was sure that his account of exactly what happened was inaccurate—very possibly unintentionally, since gauging speed with the naked eye is, at best, educated guesswork. But I had no cause to believe he invented the offense out of the blue.
So I passed on my day in court. I did not feel the ticket I received was in the spirit of the law that compels us to come to a full and complete stop at each and every stop sign, and that made the whole affair harder to swallow than the $200+ fine (which is saying something, because I’m not exactly swimming in dough over here). But it is up to each officer’s discretion if/when to let the letter of the law go in favor of the spirit.
I got to thinking about this the other night when I caught myself at a complete stop at that same intersection, around midnight, a clear view in every direction showing not another moving vehicle in sight. I realized that I had formed a habit, that I have been doing the same thing at just about every stop sign for the last year. But there was one notable exception.
A few months later one of my friends purchased a motorscooter, and he asked to ride mine around the neighborhood for comparison. He jumped on mine, I jumped on his, and we took a leisurely spin through his residential neighborhood. When we came to the little Rose Park traffic circle, I basically blew right through a stop sign. It was daylight and clear, and the circle was deserted…save for one police car sitting curbside on the adjacent street. I saw it clearly, but my mind was attending to the lack of traffic, and I simply forgot the stop sign was there. I drove around the circle once, and then as I came around a second time the officer waved me over. Puzzled, I pulled up to him.
“Did you know you blew through that stop sign right there?” he asked, pointing. I looked in the direction he indicated and beheld the back of that unmistakable octagon.
“No,” I said, crestfallen. “I just spaced out, I guess.”
“Be more careful next time,” he replied. And I was on my way.
I don’t know which had more of an effect on me: the ticket, or being let out of a ticket when the violation was more egregious. All I know for sure is that I’m not much of a California stopper anymore. And however excessive such a precaution is, it isn’t unsafe. So I suppose traffic enforcement isn’t all bad.