HARRISBURG—As a follow up to our post last night about Harrisburg police, some public input has come along that shows exactly WHY people need to be “policing the police” now more than ever before.
One of our good sources in Saline County has advised that both city and county officers have been told that in order to get more grant money, they have to “spend what they have left,” ostensibly from prior grant money. They have therefore been directed to write at least one ticket, per hour, per shift, until June 20, 2013.
This, our source said, would explain why there is a plethora of ‘turn signal’ and ‘license plate light’ pull-overs, even if there’s no real light out, in order to double up on tickets. This, despite the fact that “there are too many idiots to count around here making meth.”
Our source advised that one incident in particular that sticks in his head involved officer Kenny Shires, who, at 6:58 a.m., “was running late for work. He flew down Poplar Street like his ass was on fire, blew the red light onto Main, to pull into the parking lot at the cop shop for his 7 a.m. shift. I thought he was going to run my ass off the road.”
Pay careful attention to this next part…
The advice our source is giving for Harrisburg residents is “wear your seatbelt, watch your speed and for God’s sake use your turn signal.” All of these are always good ideas, but when you have an entire police department being lead along by the carrot-and-stick of grants, you can’t expect open and above-board behavior out of all of them; hopefully, the good cops on the force (and Harrisburg does have some) will be responding to this latest development a little more fairly.
And as an addendum to this post, remember during this and every holiday with the roadblocks the various policing agencies set up, you DO NOT have to A) go through them or B) “show your papers” (license, registration, insurance) upon demand. There is no probable cause for a stop at these roadblocks, therefore, unless the officer has a reason to pull you have that involves an infraction of some sort (and turning around to avoid a roadblock isn’t an infraction). Remember the three things to say when you’re asked for your papers:
“Am I under arrest?”
“Am I being detained?”
“Am I free to go?”
Don’t offer anything else. If they arrest you for asking these questions, you have a massive civil lawsuit you can file. You keep asking these questions until the answer to the final one is “Yes” and then get on your way.
Happy Memorial Day to you.