The People v. Donk & Peg

Straight from twelfth grade into junior college

Buddy buddy buddy I passed my exam

Makin' me a law enforcement person

Got me a gun and a badge, I'm a man

Radar gun

Radar gun

Forty three from where I was sitting

Thirty miles an hour is the law of our land

Please remove your license, find your registration

And what is the name of your insurance plan?

Radar gun

Radar gun

I'm making money and I'm havin' fun

With my radar gun

Radar gun

With my brand new radar gun

-The Bottle Rockets

So, last Saturday night Peg and I got to experience one of those rites of passage usually reserved for young black men.

No, I'm not talking about dating a Kardashian. We had the rare pleasure of what the law calls a "pretextual stop".

We'd had a great day, an epic day, starting with coffee on the veranda at the lakefront condo, then back to the house to relax, then to Ithaca for a concert at the State Theater featuring Judy Collins and Graham Nash.

The concert ended with Graham and all us Q-tip liberals belting out "Ohio" at the top of our lungs, a grim sort of song about what happens when the law and order crowd gets out-of-hand.

An adumbration, that.

Afterwards we fatefully decided we were too tired for a nightcap, and began the hourlong drive through the hills back to Corning.

The streets were deserted when we arrived a little before midnight. A block from here, at the intersection of First and Pine, I stopped and turned left. Just as I passed the house on my way up the hill, turning into the alley toward our garage, my rearview suddenly filled with flashing blue lights. A Corning Police SUV rolled in behind us in the alley. I stopped, of course.

After a pregnant couple minutes a paunchy young man from central casting showed up at Peg's window, rather than mine. He peered around with his flashlight into the car.

"Any idea why I stopped you?"

"Nope."

"You failed to signal when you turned left down the hill."

Now, based on the spot from which he emerged, this representative of the Thin Blue Line was sitting a block-and-a-half-away, and had to peer through a park full of leafy trees to spot the blinker, vel non.

But that wasn't the point, of course.

"How much have you two had to drink tonight."

I wanted to tell him to go f*ck himself, but before I could get it out there Peg answered, in a way that at least had a small measure of truthiness, "Nothing".

In fact we'd had wine with supper, but that was over three yours ago. We were both dead sober, with whatever good feelings that still flowed from that glass of wine melted away by this encounter by a fat white guy with a gun.

"Been smokin' a little weed?" Legal here, but whatever.

"No," Peg replied, quite truthfully indeed.

"What are you doing up here? Just hanging around Corning?" Our Inspector Clouseau had spotted the Florida license plate, obviously.

I found this rather insulting. "No, in fact that's our garage twenty feet in front of us. Peg works at Arnot as a CRNA."

He kept peering around inside the car, looking for something, anything. Finally, he told us to stay there (what the hell else would we do?) while he took my license and registration back to his vehicle.

And there we sat for fifteen minutes, neighborhood illuminated by his blue flashers, us wishing we could go to bed but wondering if he'd find a reason to arrest us, or drag me out of the car for stupid human tricks in the alley.

Finally he came back. "Your registration is expired." This was a surprise to me. "You need to call your tag office and get that fixed."

Before he could walk away, Peg asked for his last name, then his first. I remember Hall. Her tone was polite, but terse.

And just like that, it was over. I was shaking when I walked into the house, furious and humiliated and understanding why folks want to do violence toward the bully at the car window when this sort of thing happens.

If you're a Republican, I'd like to thank you for electing the folks who appointed the Supreme Court Justices who decided several years ago that pretextual traffic stops are not a constitutional violation, that if they see something, anything, that is a legitimate excuse for a stop--a burned out taillight, an expired tag, or failing to use a turn signal when there was no one there but Badged Ambush Boy to see it--they can stop you and look for something in plain view in the passenger compartment that provides probable cause for a search.

I bet you didn't know that, figured it only happens to young black men so who the hell cares. Well, it happened to two sixty-somethings in a very expensive car coming home from a date. Maybe you're next.

There's a bill coursing through the New York Legislature to ban this practice--if a cop sees you fail to signal and it's not a safety issue, they simply flag your license plate and send you an email reminding you to use your blinker. That bill has died in one prior session, if I had to guess because the law enforcement lobby sort of likes this game.

If you want a deep dive into all this, the legalities and reality of the danger pretextual stops pose---almost entirely to the hapless driver, and not the cop as portrayed in our popular culture--go find Last Week Tonight with John Oliver from a few days ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ygQ2wEwJw

Oliver spends the time it takes to fully unpack the issue, and shows how this seemingly unconstitutional practice has become a standard tactic police use against someone they want to detain and search for reasons having nothing to do with the blinker. It's ridiculous.

Oddly enough, in all my years down South I've never had a Southern cop or deputy pull a stunt like this. When they pulled me over down there, by God I earned it.