For your reading enjoyment, this is what happened to me on Friday night on our way home from the gym. This time its a 61(1), loud muffler ticket.
It was about 9pm, we were at the intersection of 99th and whyte and turned up 99th on our way home.... got about 6 blocks down 99th when i saw the flashers back at the whyte intersection so i had an idea what was coming, but they shut the lights off as soon as they got through the intersection so i just carried on and got all the way to our parking garage and had the door open and was about to go in to park when the patrol car came whipping around and actually pulled into the garage behind us. Scared the crap out of me because I thought he was going to rear end us. He had never put his lights or siren on, but he must have been making serious time to catch up to us that quickly.
So there we are, us and Mr. Junior Policeman (why do I always get pulled over by young guys) parked inside the closed parking garage. The officer proceeds to tell me that my car is kind of noisy, asks me if it is even my car and says that he wanted to ticket me for speeding too but he didn't get me on the radar even though he knows I was flying (I got up to 60 while accelerating away from the corner, but slowed to 50 once I shifted out of 2nd
Then he writes up the ticket and comes back. Before he gives me that little yellow paper he decides to give me a lecture about how people at the intersection looked at my car when I drove through (its a bright orange cobra, everybody looks no matter what) and that my car was too loud for whyte ave. I said it can't be that loud, I hear Harleys with straight pipes going up and down the street all the time and my car is no where near as loud as them (big mistake). I guess the guy had just started a diet or something because he then sets in with the "I'm on the streets every day, you think I don't know what a Harley sounds like?". I thought he was going to try and pull me out of my car and shoot me, my wife was sitting there shaking she was so scared, but being the idiot that I am I told him that my car was no where near as loud as a Harley and then he told me that I could just go to court and fight it and he'd tell the judge everything he "saw" (you know what that means right). So he gave me ticket and I asked him if there were any demerits associated with it and he said he didn't know because they don't deal with any of that stuff. Guess he just does a search in the computer for keywords like "muffler" and then writes a ticket for whatever pops up.
So then I started up my car (VROOOOOOM), pulled into my stall and left them stuck inside the garage (needs a pass to get in/out) until somebody else was nice enough to let them out.
-Sigh, its not that I disagree that my car is loud because it is loud and I personally feel that it is excessive, which is why I had plans of changing it anyway, but the officer's attitude and behavior were very poor and unprofessional. The threats about giving me more tickets if he could just pissed me off because it took him so long to get to the intersection initially that he must have been quite far back in traffic on the other side of the intersection when I turned so there is literally no way he could have even seen me moving beyond the actual corner. He was just making threats for their own sake and lying to my face about "everything he saw" because he couldn't have seen anything. That and the fact that he was so aggressive that it actually frightened my wife is more than a little disturbing.
So we can chalk another one up under the "EPD Officer with Bad Attitude" column.
PS - Anybody have any comments about an officer pursuing a suspect through traffic and on to private property without the use of siren or lights? Or that the local law simply states that a muffler cannot be "excessively" loud, but does not specify a required decible rating.
It was about 9pm, we were at the intersection of 99th and whyte and turned up 99th on our way home.... got about 6 blocks down 99th when i saw the flashers back at the whyte intersection so i had an idea what was coming, but they shut the lights off as soon as they got through the intersection so i just carried on and got all the way to our parking garage and had the door open and was about to go in to park when the patrol car came whipping around and actually pulled into the garage behind us. Scared the crap out of me because I thought he was going to rear end us. He had never put his lights or siren on, but he must have been making serious time to catch up to us that quickly.
So there we are, us and Mr. Junior Policeman (why do I always get pulled over by young guys) parked inside the closed parking garage. The officer proceeds to tell me that my car is kind of noisy, asks me if it is even my car and says that he wanted to ticket me for speeding too but he didn't get me on the radar even though he knows I was flying (I got up to 60 while accelerating away from the corner, but slowed to 50 once I shifted out of 2nd
Then he writes up the ticket and comes back. Before he gives me that little yellow paper he decides to give me a lecture about how people at the intersection looked at my car when I drove through (its a bright orange cobra, everybody looks no matter what) and that my car was too loud for whyte ave. I said it can't be that loud, I hear Harleys with straight pipes going up and down the street all the time and my car is no where near as loud as them (big mistake). I guess the guy had just started a diet or something because he then sets in with the "I'm on the streets every day, you think I don't know what a Harley sounds like?". I thought he was going to try and pull me out of my car and shoot me, my wife was sitting there shaking she was so scared, but being the idiot that I am I told him that my car was no where near as loud as a Harley and then he told me that I could just go to court and fight it and he'd tell the judge everything he "saw" (you know what that means right). So he gave me ticket and I asked him if there were any demerits associated with it and he said he didn't know because they don't deal with any of that stuff. Guess he just does a search in the computer for keywords like "muffler" and then writes a ticket for whatever pops up.
So then I started up my car (VROOOOOOM), pulled into my stall and left them stuck inside the garage (needs a pass to get in/out) until somebody else was nice enough to let them out.
-Sigh, its not that I disagree that my car is loud because it is loud and I personally feel that it is excessive, which is why I had plans of changing it anyway, but the officer's attitude and behavior were very poor and unprofessional. The threats about giving me more tickets if he could just pissed me off because it took him so long to get to the intersection initially that he must have been quite far back in traffic on the other side of the intersection when I turned so there is literally no way he could have even seen me moving beyond the actual corner. He was just making threats for their own sake and lying to my face about "everything he saw" because he couldn't have seen anything. That and the fact that he was so aggressive that it actually frightened my wife is more than a little disturbing.
So we can chalk another one up under the "EPD Officer with Bad Attitude" column.
PS - Anybody have any comments about an officer pursuing a suspect through traffic and on to private property without the use of siren or lights? Or that the local law simply states that a muffler cannot be "excessively" loud, but does not specify a required decible rating.