Arrest-Proof Yourself (48 page)

Your car—the Easter Bunny’s gift to law enforcers.

Traffic stops are dangerous. Bad guys have a distressing habit of poking pistols and shotguns out car windows and opening fire. To see what’s going on, drivers will swerve off the road and crash into police cruisers and run over cops. For these reasons police have developed specific techniques to minimize traffic-stop risks. I’ll discuss these in upcoming chapters.

THE UNIFORM ARREST CODE

Every aggressive cop has a policing bible that stands in the place of honor on his or her bookshelf, beside the hand-to-hand combat guides, weapons manuals, police-procedure books, and evidence tomes. This is the Uniform Traffic Code. Every state has one. Their titles may vary, but these volumes have one thing in common. They’re huge! Most have well over a thousand pages of dense, two-columned text that lists thousands of traffic infractions for which you can be stopped and receive citations. Why bureaucrats require more words to regulate driving than God needed to reveal His Creation in the Bible is a mystery even a lawyer can’t explain.

Many of these laws are incredibly petty. Others are catchalls, such as “careless driving,” which cover anything. The upshot is that it’s nearly impossible for even the most upstanding citizen to drive a vehicle in 100 percent compliance with the law. Aggressive cops study the traffic code with religious fervor, not because they want citizens to drive safely, but because they want to stop more cars, write more tickets, perform more searches, and make more arrests. These blasted books should be called the Uniform Arrest Code.

Here are some examples. In Florida it’s illegal to do any of the following.

Get run over by a car. Should you survive, you might wake up in intensive care with a citation taped to your bandages.

Coast, i.e., disengage the transmission and roll. So every time you push in the clutch and cruise, you’re in violation. Fortunately, Florida is flat as a pancake, so nobody coasts much.

Follow a fire truck or emergency vehicle closer than 500 feet (one and a half football fields, if you count the end zones). Does this ever happen in rush hour? Fuggedaboudit.

Mount a light on the side of a vehicle that is any color except amber. For cops in need of a Great White Defendant or celebrity felon, the solution is easy. Just stop a limousine! They have white side lights. Cops will have to work their way through a thicket of newlyweds, but they’ll strike gold sooner or later.

Carry a combustible fuel in a bladder or other nonapproved container. Obviously the state has an interest in the safe transport of inflammables, but in Florida this is a third-degree felony!

This last infraction suggests the following to any cop who has committed the serious violation called insufficient police activity and needs to make some quick arrests to score points and keep the sarge happy.

1. Drive to an area of high arrestability.

2. Hide the cruiser near a gas station until some clueless type pulls in and fills a milk jug with gas for the lawn mower or kerosene for the space heater.

3. Make felony arrest and enter same on monthly tally.

It’s important to note that most traffic codes were enacted by legislatures solely for the purpose of making driving safe. The use of traffic codes to make more arrests is an unintended consequence.

“YOUR PAPERS, PLEASE”: THE CITIZEN INSPECTION SYSTEM

The primary purpose of driver’s licenses, vehicle registrations, and license plates is not to help you drive safely, but to allow the government to check on you and collect fees and fines. How can standing in line in a government office each year in order to get a sticker for your license plate have anything to do with how you drive? It has everything to do with the government having an opportunity to check where you live and whether you have outstanding traffic tickets or warrants. A huge proportion of traffic tickets are for the infraction of “failure to complete government paperwork and pay government fees.”

All this paperwork ensnarls the clueless in never-ending complexities since they lack organization, reading skills, a sense of time and urgency, and a permanent address at which to receive government notices. Minor traffic violations quickly escalate. Fail to pay traffic tickets and your license is suspended. Get stopped with a suspended license and you get arrested or receive a notice to appear in court. Fail to appear and you get a fine, bench warrant, and another arrest, this time with incarceration. Fail to meet with your probation officer after you get out, and it’s back to jail or state prison. And on it goes for the human meat processed over and over through the criminal justice sausage grinder. Please note that none of these violations is a crime against people or property. These are paperwork and procedural crimes. They do not hurt citizens; they only annoy government.

ABOUT THAT PAPERWORK

Let’s be blunt here. Don’t even
think
about driving outlaw with a suspended license, unpaid traffic tickets, and no insurance. It’s not happening in the age of police cruiser computers. Cops run vehicle license tags all day, every day. When they find your paperwork out of order, it’s cop time, with vehicle search, vehicle seizure, and maybe a trip to jail. To keep that car insurance paid, settle those outstanding traffic tickets, and get your suspended license reinstated,
do whatever it takes
. If this means getting a second job or borrowing money, do it. It may mean cutting spending for cell phones, the Internet, club hopping, mall shopping, bar crawling, cigarettes, beer, and the products of your favorite neighborhood drug dealer, who is probably a police snitch anyway. But how bad is that? In jail, there’s no fun. As for jailhouse sex, we won’t even go there.

Helpful hint: Cops in need of writing a few tickets and making some cheap busts sometimes hang around motor vehicle bureau offices to catch people with suspended licenses. Cops can bust you anytime before you pay up and get your license cleared. So when you get the cash to clear your license, park your car
across the street
from the motor vehicle bureau office and stay away from cops until your paperwork is squeaky clean. Once it is, keep the paperwork in your car. Don’t assume that cop computers are 100 percent accurate and have instantly updated information.

The lesson here? To avoid cops and stay free you’ve got to drive street legal. This means you must do the following.

1. Make sure your driver’s license is current—not expired, not suspended, and not, for God’s sake, revoked.

2. Make sure all traffic fines are paid, including parking tickets.

3. Keep your insurance paid up and current.

4. Keep onboard copies of prescriptions for pills you may be carrying and for insulin and syringes if you’re diabetic. Cops do
not
like to find syringes without a prescription.

5. Keep receipts for all this stuff in the car where you can reach them quickly. In a later chapter I’ll provide some car creds that help you organize all this paper.

6. Make sure you have no smoking tailpipes, broken headlights or taillights, or other gimmes that make you cop bait. More about this later.

7. Wear your seat belt. Consider your seat belt cop repellant. In many states, not wearing one gives cops an easy reason to stop and search you.

8. If you carry a firearm, make sure you are carrying it legally. Each state has different laws concerning firearms. Memorize these laws.

9. You’vegottodrivesafelyandslowly,evenifthismakesyoucrazy. If you feel the need for speed, save up your cash and go to a race track that rents time to ordinary people. There, after receiving a driving lesson and signing a waiver of liability (a “you can’t sue” letter), you can roar ’round and ’round with the pedal to the metal until your motor explodes. No cops, no probs.

SUSPENDED LICENSES