Fix-It Ticket Follies.

I haven't done it in a while, but every so often I have to go to the front counter of the SCPD and sign off a ticket for some citizen who got dinged for an equipment violation (or Fix-It Ticket, as they're commonly known here in Cali). 

These can be entertaining, at least on occasion. Like the kid who hands you a crumpled cite for tinted windows that's clearly been rattling around in his wallet for a while. When you ask to see the vehicle, the front door windows are covered in sticky goo - the remnants of the adhesive from his tint ("Hell no, I ain't gonna go back to the shop and have 'em take it off. I can do that my own damn self!"). 

It's also the law in this state that you've got to have two license plates on your vehicle. DMV issued you two, and you need to put both on, regardless of what you think it does to the esthetics of your wannabe pimpmobile. Usually, when I ask for proof of correction, they smile like an eager preschooler, and hand over the brown DMV envelope - with the plate inside it. 

"Good for you. You have the other plate. Now put it on."

"Huh?!?"

"The law says the front plate must be affixed to the vehicle. Carrying it around with you doesn't count. Neither does leaving it on top of the dash."

At this point, the smiles disappear, and they aren't so happy anymore. It gets worse when I'm standing over them in the parking lot as they wield the screwdriver.

I went through this routine one day, then told the owner, "Let's go out and take a look at your car."

I walk out into the public parking lot, only to come face-to-face with one of the ugliest 80's Mustangs on earth. Every body panel is dented, scratched or cracked, and the car has been rattle-can sprayed (badly) in various shades of gray primer. It's impossible to tell at this point what color the car once was. In fact, aside from the fact it's got four wheels, I might be hard-pressed to use the term "car" at all in connection with this POS. It looks as though it might once have been used at one of those carnivals where you pay to hit the thing with a sledgehammer.

So. Once again, I tell the owner:

"Look, you have to mount the plate on the car. Do that, and I'll sign the ticket off."

"I can't do that!!!"

Mmmmmmmkay. I know I'm going to be sorry I asked...

"And why is that?"

"Because it's a CLASSIC!!! It'll ruin the collector value!!!" 

Remember that part in The Big Lebowski where The Dude gets his stolen Torino back, and he asks the cop, "Do you have any leads?" Remember the cop's reaction? 

I had to really struggle to not do that...

"My GPS said to turn."

Ah, one of the many wonders of modern technology...the GPS receiver. Let the little box uplink to the satellites, and you can you just let it tell you where to go. Right? Right?!? Well...sorta.

The makers of these devices would have you thinking they're damn near foolproof. Fools, OTOH, are way more ingenious than the GPS makers give them credit for.

The box is not infallible, and combined with operator error (aka: RTFM), the results can be either pretty amusing or pretty horrific, depending on your point of view (I'm mildly surprised that the guy who drove his million-dollar Bugatti Veyron into a Texas lake didn't blame it on the GPS).

Case #1: Big rig driver is looking for a delivery address, when his GPS (supposedly) tells him to make a left turn. As he's making the turn, he looks up and realizes that the turn pocket he's in leads nowhere but into the parking lot of a hotel, where he may not be able to turn his rig around. 

His solution: crank the steering wheel hard right, which might work if there weren't a raised concrete island next to the turn pocket. The big rig then high-centers on top of the island, smashing the exterior fuel tanks before the truck comes to a stop, stuck. 

By the time I get there, a river of diesel fuel from the punctured tanks is running down the street, and the Fire guys are having to call for the Street Dept., as they've run out of absorbent.   We now need to wait for a tow large enough to haul the truck off, and the big question is whether the tanks are going to leak even worse once the truck gets pulled off the median (they didn't).

Final tally: drived cited for unsafe turning and failure to use a designated truck route, a couple of hours cleaning up the hazmat incident, and a hit and run collision that occurred in the hotel parking lot as we diverted traffic through it.  And that address he was looking for? Not even in Small City, but in another city ten miles away (and not readily accessible from the freeway he was on).

Case #2: Another big rig driver, with some kind of enormous piece of machinery on a lowboy trailer, exits the freeway onto one of Small City's main thoroughfares. At the top of the off-ramp, he cuts the corner too close to a traffic signal, shearing the signal pole off at the base. The signal head then falls onto the rear of the truck, smashing the signal lamps. The broken glass cut the lines to the truck's air brakes, immobilizing it in the traffic lanes, until a mechanic was able to come out and repair it. 

Driver #2 was looking for a delivery address in a city over an hour away by freeway. 

The one thing these geniuses had in common? "My GPS told me to turn left."

Remember when you had to actually demonstrate some driving skill in order to be a truck driver?!? I don't think it was that long ago...

The CSI Syndrome.

As we all know (unless you've been living in a cave), all the CSI shows have been wildly successful for CBS. Unfortunately, the public tends to believe that the shows actually bear some resemblance to reality (when was the last time you saw Marg Helgenberger or Emily Procter in a Tyvek suit and booties, crawling around on hands and knees for hours looking for trace evidence? Ain't gonna happen).

So what does this have to do with crashes? Well, if there's serious injuries or fatalities, the SCPD's going to seal off the scene, and the collision investigation team's going to spend the next several hours doing their thing. But if you got a scraped fender coming out of Costco, you do not need to preserve the scene. Trust me, I can probably figure it out (and there's a good chance I've taken some version of this crash before).  If you and the other party give me wildly conflicting versions of what happened, and there's no independent witnesses*, well, it may just go in the books as "unable to determine party at fault". That's life.

*And no, your cousin who was in the passenger seat texting her friend is not an independent witness.

By way of example: 

It's a bitterly cold, wet evening in December, and I just came from a crash that took out a traffic signal and heavily damaged two vehicles. The Electric Dept.'s managed to patch things together until they can get a full crew out to get things working again, the vehicles have been towed, and I'm outta there.  

One of our Animal Control Officers just got flagged down for a crash a few blocks from the PD, so I get dispatched. When I arrive, there's a total of three vehicles with varying degrees of damage, around a major intersection, and traffic is backing up in all directions. Other SCPD officers are on scene, though, and we're getting everyone off the road and into parking lots, at least the cars that can move. Which leaves the car sitting at the light, blocking traffic into Small City's Old Town. 

The damage to this car, I found out, consisted of the following: they got clipped when two other cars collided...and lost a hubcap.  A. Hubcap. 

"Is your car drivable?"

"As far as I know."

"And you've been sitting here all this time why?"

"Well, we had to preserve the scene until you got here." 

"No you don't. Move the car into that parking lot."

"Are you sure?"

AAAARRGGGGGHHH. "Yes. I'm sure." 

So please, watch CSI, in all its forms (I don't have TV right now, so I have no idea what the latest iteration might be. CSI: Boise maybe?). It's entertaining, I admit. Just don't get to thinking it's how things work in the real world.

One more time...

One unfortunate fact of life is that if you write tickets for moving violations, you have to go to Traffic Court. Traffic Court judges know that my cites were issued following a crash, so I'm going to have multiple parties testifying, as well as witnesses. Since that takes time, my cases are inevitably heard last. 

On this particular day, though, when Judge X calls the roll, the defendant isn't there. 

"Officer EightyTwo, I think we're going to hear this matter first and get it out of the way."

Woohoo!

This was a rear-ender in which the defendant slammed his POS sedan into a large SUV. Defendant's POS was totaled, the only problem being that the crankcase ruptured, dumping oil all over the roadway (and creating a huge traffic backlog). Pretty straightforward; 22350 VC, unsafe speed. He was none too happy when I towed his vehicle for blocking the roadway, and probably less so when he got the cite, as he had multiple moving violations already. 

So the SUV driver and the witness come up and do their thing, and the judge renders his opinion: guilty, with a $300 penalty for the failure to appear. Suh-weet! In and out in under an hour, as opposed to the usual three. I might actually get some stuff done this morning.

As we're walking out into the lobby, the witness says:

"I think that was him."
"Who?"
"The defendant. I think he just walked by on his way into court."
"Oh, well. He's a little late. Judge X already ruled on his case." 

Except later that afternoon, I get a subpoena. For the same case. 

Turns out he showed up, gave Judge X a sob story about why he was late, and the judge vacated his earlier judgement and put the matter back on the calendar for the following week. 

So we ended up (all of us), going back to court to hear the matter a second time. And yes, the defendant lost a second time, in front of a different judge. I got OT for both appearances, so I suppose it evens out in the end.

But man, do I hate doing stuff twice. 

Gettin' by, with(out) a little help from your friends.

Nowadays, it's a given that just about everyone over the age of, say, four, has a mobile device of some sort (iPhone, Crackberry, whatever). What strikes me as odd is that virtually everyone who's involved in a crash, no matter how minor, feels they need to summon additional people (SO/parent/friend/relative) to the scene. 

The end result of this is that two-car, non-injury collisions end up with five vehicles and a dozen people milling around by the time I get there (most of whom want to offer input into the report for a crash they weren't present for).

Didn't self-sufficiency used to be a valued part of the American character? If you had a problem, you took care of it. Period. You didn't need three other people to come out and hold your hand (someone poking around the barn in the middle of the night? Grab the Winchester off the wall, and go TCB).    

                 
Look, if you're a high schooler who just crunched Dad's car, then maybe he should be present (especially if you're violating the terms of your provisonal license by carrying your minor friends.  But I digress.). But when a forty-year old, well-dressed man's biggest concern at the scene is, "I gotta call my wife," because he dinged her Escalade, well...something ain't right. For God's sake, dude...man up. (His wife's comment, BTW, after leaving work and driving all the way to the crash: "I don't know why he called me (sigh)."

Snow day!?!

Here in Cali, people can barely keep their vehicles on the roadway at the best of times (clear, daylight, light traffic). Throw some weather into the mix, or at least what passes for weather here on the Left Coast, and chaos ensues.

I'm pretty sure that in other parts of the country that get snowed on regularly, the first snowfall of the season isn't cause to send TV news crews up to the higher elevations, cameras in hand, so that some Ken/Barbie can stand by the side of the roadway in order to show the folks at home what snow looks like. Every. Single. Winter. (FWIW, I suggested they just stick some fake pine trees in the station parking lot, buy a big fan, and throw some Ivory Snow around as the reporter stands there. It'd have to be cheaper.)

So tomorrow, the National Weather Service is calling for snow levels down to 1,000 feet. Which means the SmallCity PD Traffic Unit might be in for about two or three times the normal number of collisions. I, howver, will be enjoying my day off. I might turn the scanner on, though, just to hear the insanity.