tankdilla's Journal: One (of many) things I hate about police

I work 3rd shift, so when I go to work, there is little to no traffic. This makes it easy to get from point A to point B relatively quickly, except when the police decide they want to exercise their authority/ability to make traffic move along at a crawling pace. They will intentionally drive very slow, at or below the speed limit, and pull over anyone that attempts to drive faster than them. So on a clear straight road, you there is this big group of cars accumulating because the police want to be an ass. Then there are times when everyone is driving along, not speeding, but moving along at a moderate pace. The police swoop in from nowhere and all cars in the left hand lane move to the right hand lane (on a 2 lane street) to get out of the police's way. The police car goes and starts driving right alongside one of the cars. He continues driving alongside, until there is enough space between cars that he can signal that he wants to pull into the right lane. He gets in the right lane and turns on his lights and pulls the car over. Now it could happen that the police knew something about that car, but the way he swooped in, it seems like he just wanted to pull someone over, so he decided to pull over the car at the front of the group.

I guess they do things like that because the suburb doesn't have many real crimes going on, so they do stupid stuff to keep them from getting bored. But they're not making anything safer. In my opinion, they're making things more dangerous. No one drives the speed limit all the time. At most, it's accepted to go 10 miles over the limit, but sometimes traffic is moving along faster than that. You can't do that when there are asshole police officers on the prowl at night. You have to drive and act like a scared animal, looking all around for upcoming police so that you can slow down in time. For me, it leads to driving while looking in my rearview mirror way too much, and not paying attention to the road. Fearing that a police car may be behind me waiting for me to go just fast enough that he feels i'm endangering humanity and deciding I need a ticket to help me slow down only makes me pay attention to the road less. There are cases when people need to be pulled over, when they're really speeding. 20 - 30 miles over the limit is speeding, but not 1 - 20 in my opinion. Frivolous speeding tickets only make people weary of police all the time and spend more time looking for police than looking at the road.