My next-door neighbor is a hardworking young fellow who cuts grass for a living. One Spring day, about five years ago, I agreed to go along with him to help him catch up after a few days of rain. I always wear a seatbelt and had been wearing one earlier that day; but, when we made a short jaunt from one customer’s yard to another, we neglected to buckle up and wouldn’t you know that’s just when we happened to pass a Maryland Heights (Missouri) patrolman going in the opposite direction.
We were only going a few blocks in a residential neighborhood and driving well below the speed limit, but he must have noticed that we weren’t strapped in, because he turned around and pulled us over on some trumped up pretext (evidently, patrolmen were not allowed to stop someone solely for a seatbelt violation). Then he launched into his canned “click it or ticket” shtick, giving the clear impression that he thought he was being quite humorous (I was not aware of the campaign at the time and had no idea what he was talking about). The upshot was, we both got $10 tickets, which effectively wiped out my young friend’s profit from the last hour of mowing.
It gets worse. When we went to the local police station to pay the fine, the policeman clerk who took our tickets and rang up our fines announced an absurdly high total of several thousand dollars. This, evidently, was more of the “click it or ticket” humor that we’d experienced from the patrolman. Needless to say, we were not amused.
With a background in advocacy and public relations, I have to say I can’t imagine a better way to create ill will toward a police force than the sort of behavior I encountered that day. I’ve always had great respect for the police. My two best friends in the world — one daughter’s godparents — are a (husband and wife) pair of retired police officers in my hometown of New Orleans. But now that respect has been needlessly diminished. For the uniformed clowns at the police department in Maryland Heights (Maryland Heist?), I have nothing but contempt.