THE CITY ROAD WARRIOR

I’VE NEVER BEEN troubled with obsession. Obsessions require concentration and consistency of opinion. My mind is more like a flophouse for random ideas in transit. My wife, Suzie, is my family’s source of consistency. Her opinions are unvarying. At one time or another she has spoken out on vitamins C and E, cordless drills, Brussels sprouts, live Christmas trees-and the police. “Cops,” she once said, “are wimps when they’re not in uniform.” I had never asked her exactly what she meant by that.

Then one day the wishy-washy soil of my mind was sown with the earnest seeds of obsession. We were on our way to an uneventful hamburger, when suddenly a man loomed up in the roadway, a frantic figure, waving his arms in a great show of negative body language. I changed lanes to go around him.

“It’s a cop,” Suzie whispered.

After verbally rapping my knuckles for “not slowing down faster,” the cop informed me through unsmiling lips that I had been clocked on the radar going forty-two in a thirty-mile zone.

“This really isn’t a very good speed trap,” I said as he wrote out the ticket. When he raised his eyes from his ticketbook, I pointed out how the entire flow of rush hour traffic on the other side of the street was moving at more than forty miles an hour.

He started writing again without looking at the other side of the street.

“And another thing: you set up your trap too close to that stop sign there. I may well have been going over forty back where you gunned me with the radar, but I was already braking for the stop sign even before I saw you. Nobody goes realty fast through here because of the stop sign.”

He tore two copies of the citation from his pad and thrust them through the window. Suzie and I lingered long enough to watch him spring his trap on a green pickup. It was comical, really: two grown men in boots and motorcycle helmets crouching behind a bush, waiting for the light to change up the street. They were herding wrongdoers into a residential cul-de-sac like wild horses into an old box canyon. It was the Great Ticket-book Massacre.

We drove around the block and returned, very slowly, past the scene of the crime. And, well, forget all I said about its not being a good speed trap. It was in fact a great speed trap. The unsuspecting drivers had absolutely no chance at all. Cars naturally accelerated from the traffic signal 400 yards away, swooping down into a turn under a railroad bridge. When they emerged from the dip 200 yards later, they were looking right down the radar barrel.

It was also a great location from the standpoint of victim availability. The flow of traffic always runs at forty miles per hour through there, A cop could haul in speeders there like a fisherman fills his nets in a salmon run.

As we drove on, Suzie was reading the back of the ticket. “Listen to this,” she said. “You can send them your forty-one-dollar payment or you can ask for a trial-in front of a judge or a jury.” She raised her head slowly. “Do it, baby! Ask for a trial! That cop was a wimp. He won’t show up, and when he doesn’t, they’ll drop the charges!”

Our eyes met as we pulled into Wendy’s parking lot. She believed it. I almost believed it. The next morning I was in the library.



A MAGAZINE article raised the basic question: money. “Traffic fines have traditionally been set just low enough so that most working drivers lose money if they take time off to fight.” A driver could lose money, the author said, even while winning the case. They can increase the fine in court, too. But then, the writer added. “You should also look into the impact a ticket would have on your insurance premium and your insurability.”

Another article said that only 10 percent of those ticketed actually fight traffic tickets. and of those who do, only about one-third have any chance whatever of winning.

Mentally I reached for my checkbook. But first, knowing. I suppose, that Suzie would be along with her own brand of unswayable logic, I made a couple of phone calls.

The Traffic Division at police headquarters told me I could be fined as much as $200 or as little as one dollar if I lost my case. It was up to the judge or jury.

The other call went to my insurance agent. “This one won’t hurt you.” he replied to my question. “It’s the second one that’ll hurt you. It could cost you 40 to 60 percent on your insurance premium. If you can afford it, it’s best to keep tickets off the record.”

“What do you mean, ’afford’ it? Afford what?”

He paused as adults do before they answer a complicated question from a child-or one from an adult with a flophouse mind. “Afford a lawyer,” he said flatly.

“A lawyer? I was going to defend myself.”

“Pay a lawyer a hundred dollars, and it’s off your record,” he said. “Do it yourself and you lose in court and pay more money, and it’s still on your record, and you’ve wasted time.”

It’s a world gone crazy, I thought as I hung up. This must happen to hundreds of people every day! For those with money, it’s an annoyance, a gnat bite; for those without, it’s grief. I knew I was hooked; I had to beat this speed trap. When I was a kid, everybody used to talk about the rural county in Georgia that funded itself with the revenue from its speed trap. (“Hey, Bo, heah’s another Yankee on his way to Flo-ri-da!”) As I recall, somebody big, like the FBI, stepped in and made them cut the trap. But here, in 1985, the Dallas police are trapping with all the respectability of a church bingo game. Why?

For public safety? Think about it. If the flow of traffic is moving at ten miles over the speed limit, day after day, that is by definition a safe speed. That’s how the day’s volume of traffic manages to pass through that particular corridor. And look at the statistics: in 1979. when 245,375 tickets were issued, there were 10,105 injury accidents and 196 deaths on Dallas streets. In 1984 the figures were 357.711 tickets, 10,221 injury accidents. 202 deaths. No relation between traffic tickets and accidents.

As a deterrent? How can a cop in the bushes be a deterrent? Knowing there are X number of cops in X number of bushes out there doesn’t make you stick to the speed limit. In fact you drive with the flow of traffic. The occasional cop in the bushes doesn’t really deter anybody.

A deterrent to me is the white car parked in the school zone-where everybody can see it, and slow down, and save kids’ lives.

A deterrent to me is the white car with flashing light pulling over the dodger and weaver in traffic going seventy miles per hour. That kind of deterrent even gives you, the good driver, a warm feeling of security.

A deterrent to me is the public notice on radio and TV warning of traffic crackdowns. They do it when school opens in September and in their campaigns against drank drivers on Greenville Avenue-but they don’t do it for speed traps. In the contract between the City of Dallas and the State Department of Highways and Public Transportation for a grant to enforce the national maximum speed limit, the budget item for public information was cut two-thirds, down to $1,140, for 1986. Educating the public was obviously not a major goal of that grant. The main measure of performance for the grant, on the other hand, was “speeding citations issued.”

A deterrent to me would be a sign that says, “Watch your speed. We are.” Or a sign depicting two crouching cops: “We’re behind every bush in Dallas.” It would make me smile-and slow down. I like signs. They’re cheap. They’re good will. They’re always there. My father used to tell the story of a sign that read: “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and anybody caught going over 55 mph in Jefferson County.” I like that. Signs aren’t macho, and they don’t bring in revenue-but they work.

So what about revenue? One magazine article I read said that revenue is the main reason cities set speed traps. The article was a profile of Dale T. Smith, the man who developed the Fuzzbuster. Enforcement agencies, Smith observed, were using traffic radar “as a ready source of easy revenue, rather than a true speed deterrent.”

Is this the case in Dallas? You bet. The police department doesn’t get a dime from traffic tickets, but the city does. The city budget anticipated $13 million from traffic tickets in fiscal year 1984-85 and actually realized $12,628,021. A nice little bit of change.

A week or so later, in a bar, I sidled up to a friend who happens to be a Dallas policeman and popped the question: why speed traps? “That’s easy,” he said. “So that officers assigned to traffic duty can show they’re doing their job.”

“Why don’t they give tickets to people for running red lights?” I asked. “They could give one every time a light changes!”

He said, “They like tickets that are sure convictions, not judgment calls. If the radar says seventy, you were going seventy miles an hour. If your license tag says April and it’s May, your tag is expired. They don’t like hassles. Cops don’t get the money, but if you think officers don’t know what makes the city happy.. .”



WEEKS LATER, in my interview with the officer at the Traffic Division, I asked, “Do you have expectations that your officers will give out a certain number of tickets?”

He replied, “We look at it like this: if we have ten officers assigned to traffic enforcement and nine of them go out and write ten or fifteen tickets a day and one of them goes out and writes two tickets a day, you know, naturally there’s a problem. As far as quotas are concerned, there is none. But we have to look at it realistically: are they doing their job?”

So I had in fact been sacrificed-my forty-one dollars and my driving record-so that a traffic officer could fulfill his daily nonquota quota and not have hassles.

That was the moment of truth. I had decided to fight. I sent in my citation with a request for a jury trial, then called Suzie at work to tell her I had decided to take on the system. I think I heard the overture from “Man of la Mancha” playing softly in the background.

When I followed my insurance man’s advice and called a couple of lawyers, the plot thickened like scorched butterscotch pudding. One of the lawyers told me he handles 400 to 500 cases a month and boasted of a 95 percent record for dismissals. That’s more than twenty every working day. almost three an hour! For sixty-five dollars he takes the case out of the Dallas municipal court to the Dallas County Court of Criminal Appeals, where he almost always gets his clients’ cases dismissed on technicalities. A handful, he admitted, do have to “plea it out” and pay a modest fine.

In other words, I could pay forty-one dollars to the city and quite likely have the offense remain on my driving record, or I could pay sixty-five dollars to a lawyer and keep my record clean.

The tally of beneficiaries so far from my speed trap: one cop (professional recognition), the city budget (my forty-one dollars or whatever it turned out to be in court), and the lofty and idealistic legal profession (sixty-five dollars for a clean record).

I decided to fight the ticket on my own.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Suzie confirmed at dinner. “Lawyers are scavengers. And besides, that cop was a wimp. He won’t show up.”

I called up two friends who are lawyers and asked their advice. The more charitable of the two said I was silly. He was charitable because he wished me luck.

Back at the library, the articles I read advised me to:

1. Look for technicalities. For example,when was the radar device last checked foraccuracy? Too technical, I decided.

2. Return to the scene. Look for factorsworking in your favor and take pictures. Idid.

3. Look up the law. I did, but it showed menothing.

4. Be factual, not emotional. The jurywon’t care where you were going or how badyour day has been.

5. Remember that anyone riding with you is a witness.

The article on Fuzzbuster Smith had mentioned that his Ohio company operates a public information office, manned by a high-powered lady who goes around influencing legislatures, advising defendants on the phone, and generally working against the abuse of traffic radar. I called (513) 667-2461, but found them mostly interested in cases involving Fuzzbuster. For thirty-five dollars 1 was offered a “Legal Information Index,” more than 600 pages of “all you ever wanted to know about radar defense.”

Another article advised me to go to the court and observe the flavor of what goes on there. I never found time, but I did ask a friend who had been through it. At least he was blunt.

“You’re a fool,” he said. “I wasn’t a fool because nobody warned me. I was just naive. You’re a fool. I was indignant and wanted to tell my side to the judge. I did, and the judge said I had to pay a hundred dollars. The whole thing took five minutes. I sat through the next four cases. They all got the same bum’s rush and the same hundred-dollar fine. Take my advice and pay the forty-one dollars.”

But I was no longer listening. Not even to Suzie as she told our friend that the cop was a wimp and wouldn’t show up, or when she told me later that our friend was a wimp who didn’t know what he was talking about. My mind was a steel trap. I was going to court.

I polished my defense. I made a list of embarrassing questions to ask the arresting officer. I drew maps. I blew up my photographs of the scene. I wrote a powerful speech to the jury that ended, “If the city needs revenue, let them raise my taxes! But they shouldn’t play games with my driving record! You can stop them!” I was obsessed. And I was ready.

THE COURTROOM SCENE was remarkable. It was like being backstage at a long-running play. All the players knew their . lines-except for the guest stars, the defendants. The bailiff slouched in the jury box, chatting with the defense attorney who apparently represented all the people who wanted legal counsel that day. While we waited for the judge, someone shouted from the hall: “Hey, you-Big and Ugly!” A man walking behind the judges bench called back: “Mister Big and Ugly to you!” It was truly amusing.

Then the judge came in. buttoning his robe as he walked and swapping snappy one-liners with a regular.

The judge called out the cases that would make up the day’s docket. He read all our names aloud, and we responded that we were present. At each name, the prosecution team, seated at a table, gave the status of that case. After some names they said. “The prosecution is ready.” After other names they said the case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

Mine was dismissed.

I waited till someone from the cast left the room. “Excuse me,” I called, as he strode away toward the men’s room. “Can I ask you a question? Why was my case dismissed? I prepared my defense, and I’m a bit disappointed “

He looked at me strangely. “The officer who issued your citation didn’t show up,” he said.

I walked out into the sunlight a free man. I was walking, not leaping and shouting and holding up “We’re Number One!” index fingers. For some reason, my mind called up the statue of the blindfolded Figure of Justice. I didn’t feel personally jubilant in that moment, but I did feel happy. Happy for her, happy that she’s blindfolded. That way she doesn’t have to watch all that goes on in her name.