"Traffic Tickets What a Pain
Every police officer is issued a traffic summons book when he is
assigned to a district. The supervisors have what we used to call a quota
on tickets issued. When an officer is assigned to the traffic division, he is
expected to write at least eight moving violations a shift. But that is all he
has to do; he doesn t handle any crime scenes or domestic disturbances
or whatever else comes along. On occasion, he has to handle a traffic
accident, but that's about all. Don t get me wrong. I hated to write
tickets, especially moving violations like red lights, speeding, or no left
turn. Parking tickets were also a pain in the ass; all they accomplish is
that the poor soul that gets the ticket now hates you.
I guess that they are a necessity though, and maybe in some way
they help keep drivers from getting too crazy behind the wheel of their
car or truck. Personally, I would rather be out in the street locking up
bad guys and harassing gang bangers. Some of these traffic guys really
like working traffic, giving out their quota of summons, and putting a
few drunk drivers in jail before they kill somebody or themselves.
People that get stopped by the police for a traffic violation really
come up with some original excuses. I remember an elderly lady that we
stopped for driving the wrong way on a one-way street. This violation
is usually an open-and-shut case. When I asked her for her driver s
license and explained why we had stopped her, she called me a liar
and asked why wasn t I out chasing down dope dealers or communists
instead of bothering a woman alone in a car trying to get home.
20 DON HERION
No matter what I said to her, she had a look of hate in her eyes;
and if she had a gun, she would have shot me dead. When I began
opening the summons book to write her the ticket, she pulled an
acting job on me that was a beauty. The first thing she did was to roll
her eyes up in her head and then grab her heart like she was going to
have a heart attack right there. Well, needless to say, she hit the right
button and her act worked. Even though I knew she was probably
faking it, I didn t want to take a chance of her dropping dead in front
of me. I asked her if she needed an ambulance or wanted to be taken
to the nearest hospital. She said that she only lived two blocks from
there and that her heart pills were in her bathroom. She explained
that if she got them, she was sure to be OK. Well, at this point, I was
pretty aggravated and couldn t imagine myself giving this wacky broad
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation if she was telling the truth. Of course,
I told her that we would be glad to drive her home if she couldn t
drive. She said no, that she felt better, and she thought that she could
drive home OK.
I said, OK, lady, under the circumstances, I won t give you a ticket
this time but that you had better be more alert in the future. I just knew
that I made this old broad's day when she thought she really bullsh*tted
me about the heart attack. To top it off, when she was driving away,
she winked at me and said, Thanks, Officer, have a nice day.
The best part of all is when I got back in the squad car, my partner
Bob was just shaking his head and laughing. It seems that he had
stopped this old witch in the past for doing the same thing and she
pulled the heart attack routine on him too. He admitted that he didn t
want to take a chance and have the old broad drop dead on him either
and gave her a pass. The thing that got him was when her eyes went
up in her head and all he could see was the whites of her eyes. Later
on, we talked to a few of the other guys that were working in that part
of the district, and they all had st