My Latest Brush With The Law

I am a good, law abiding person. I wear my seat belt, and, um, usually, follow the speed limit. Imagine my surprise when I was pulled over by the police on my way to work this morning. I had just passed two police cars that had some poor guy pulled over on the side of the highway in the next little nowhere town from the little nowhere town that I live in. Like every other time I passed a cop hard at work, I just cruised right by them. I did check out the car to see if someone I knew was getting a ticket, but other than that I didn't pay it any attention.

Then a minute or two later I look in my rear view mirror and see one of the police cars coming up with it's lights on. I thought maybe he was in hot pursuit of a second suspicious driver. Unfortunately, I was right, and the other suspicious driver was me. There have been a rash of cops getting run into while they are working on the side of road in Missouri, so they are starting to enforce a rule that if you pass a cop with somebody pulled over you are supposed to slow down and get as far to the left as you can. News to me.

He just gave me a warning, but he said they are going to start giving tickets for it soon. It seems like a new version of a speed trap to me. I can see it now, two cars tag teaming poor innocent drivers. One cop would pull somebody over, and as soon as somebody passed him going 'too fast' or 'too close' he would radio the other cop and he would pull them over. Then while the second cop was writing out the ticket he would radio the first cop about somebody passing him. They could go back and forth like that all day, alternating between speeding tickets and tickets for driving by while somebody else is getting a ticket.

I don't have a problem with this new driving policy, now that I know about it, but something the cop said just about had me busting up. He said what if the driver that was pulled over was in the Taliban, and decided to pull a gun on the cop who pulled him over? The cop might have to jump out into the highway then. Right. Like the Taliban is really active in Lincoln county. And even if there was another car on the highway, I don't think jumping out into the middle of the highway would really help any. I mean, it would still be basically point blank range, unless he jumped all the way across the highway and hid in the ditch.