As far as important police work is concerned, moving violations always seem like the least-crucial activity for law enforcement to spend time on. That’s primarily because you never see them enforcing tailgating laws but they’re Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to catching speeders — which research always seems on the fence about in terms of the actual public peril it presents.
Realistically, any major disparities between vehicle speeds on a roadway presents some added risk of collision. But, last Friday, a Canadian motorist discovered you don’t have to be going all that quick to get a ticket. Mathieu Gagne was cruising behind a slow-moving police vehicle on a two-lane road in Alberta, Canada, and decided to pass. He was immediately pulled over and issued a citation for driving less than 1 mile an hour over the posted limit.
“I had the right of way, the dotted line, and there was nobody in front of me, so I decided it was alright, in my right, to pass the peace officer,” Gagne explained to CTV Edmonton.
While society’s adoption of the euphemism of “peace officer” is slightly bewildering, especially when “law enforcement official” is more applicable (it’s like calling a garbageman a “cleanliness arbiter” instead of a “sanitation worker”), the reason for Gagne’s roadside stop was not.
Stating that he was well within his rights to pass the slower-moving traffic, the driver said he was immediately confronted with flashing lights. When the officer approached his stopped Jeep, Gagne said the first words out of his mouth were, “That was pretty ballsy of you.”
“The next thing he said was, it was disrespectful. I was disrespecting him,” he said.
Gagne explained he argued that he had passed safely, but was issued a $78 citation for driving his Jeep 101 kilometers per hour in a 100 km/h zone anyway. “Send a message, but that’s the wrong message,” he said. “This is a speeding ticket. It’s demerits. That goes on my record. It goes on my insurance. My insurance goes up.”
His girlfriend, Larissa Turnbull, used social media to gripe about the event over the weekend — uploading a photo of the ticket in question and gaining plenty of public support. By Monday the posting had been shared thousands of times. Turnbull later updated it to indicate the county had rescinded the ticket.
“Upon further review, they did only estimate the driver’s speed and they did not record or measure it on a radar and laser as they indicated on the ticket,” Sturgeon County spokesperson Gwen Wolansky said.
Gagne said he was pleased not to have to deal with the ordeal behind him but expressed some remaining frustrations. “This kind of stuff shouldn’t happen,” he said.
According to Wolansky, the officer who issued the ticket is not facing any punitive action for “the error.”
Back in my day, we didn’t have social media…we only things like “paying with pennies” or “wiping your butt with the check.”
I like this process better, but it also calls all of society into question when the person with the most prolific online presence wins. It’s like a more egalitarian version of rich people getting let off in court more often.
#OfflineLivesMatter
Obligator rant about liberals, Obama, super citizens, how awful the United States is. Filling in for the coming reply from someone who clearly didn’t read the story.
(I read the story, this is all snark – damn Canadians)
Read some of the later posts.
Sorry for the O/T (though it’s also a Law & Order matter), but I was wondering if anyone at TTAC or the B&B has taken a gander at a Jalopnik piece by David Tracy about Ron Dauzet, a 74-year-old Michigan man who has amassed a collection of over 200 cars on his property but is being forced by the township to sell them off at the rate of 20 per month for violating the town ordinance against storage of unregistered cars:
http://bit.ly/2xunghS
I’m surprised that he hasn’t been contacted by an auction house to help him dispose of the cars more quickly. The problem is that he agreed to the township’s terms, so it’s not like he can ask for an injunction to give him time to organize a big sale.
Based on some of the comments made in the article, I’d guess he’d want too high of a reserve on the vehicles and too much of the proceeds to come to himself for an auction house to take this on. It’s too bad though. Because, otherwise, it would be a good solution to his problem.
I’m surprised he didn’t hire counsel and seek an injunction before filing a suit in civil court against the township.
Is that you Cartman?
If Gagne had been a Muslim illegal immigrant with a bomb in the backseat or an Antifa thug with bloody baseball bats in the backseat, then I expect the officer would have been fired immediately, and the county would be begging for forgiveness for being so non-PC.
He could have been black and been shot.
Or he could have been white and shot…
“In 2015, The Washington Post launched a real-time database to track fatal police shootings, and the project continues this year. As of Sunday, 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015. Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).”
“Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black”
Which handily illustrates the problem, given that white people outnumber black people 6:1 in America.
The problem is that for every million blacks, 52.3 of them murder each other while every million whites kill 10.1 of each other. Perhaps you want more black victims who aren’t violent criminals? Do you work for Planned Parenthood?
channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime
wow. you link to a minor British TV network known for programming trash like “Wank Week” as though we’re supposed to just accept it as a citation.
just when I think you’re the biggest piece of s**t I’ve ever encountered, you outdo yourself.
let me know when you dismount Sean Hannity.
https://qz.com/556988/here-are-four-charts-on-race-and-murder-in-america-to-tweet-back-at-donald-trump/
Here is my source. It’s from a left wing propaganda site that published false numbers to fool its followers only to correct them after people stopped paying attention. They say that on a per-capita basis, blacks kill each other over five times as often as whites but only get killed by police less than three times as often as whites. I guess cops are too racist to care as much about black communities.
“Which handily illustrates the problem, given that white people outnumber black people 6:1 in America.”
Why do people keep saying that? What relevance does that statistic have? What matters is whether incarceration rates and police violence rates are mirroring the breakdown of who is committing crimes, not whether it mirrors the population breakdown.
Channel 4 is 1) owned by government and 2) British. It must be accurate, based on left-wing standards!
“Why do people keep saying that? What relevance does that statistic have?”
Because people want to compare absolute numbers of shootings/arrests/etc to show that “there isn’t racism because more white people get it than black people” without accounting for the denominator of the actual population of the country.
Your question of “who is committing crimes” doesn’t eliminate the fundamental question, it just shifts it to “what biases might impact what is considered to be a ‘crime’ and whether/how people are charged and prosecuted for them?”
Even if minorities *do* commit violent crimes more than white people, the question then becomes “Why does the society *that white people built* drive minorities to commit crimes at a greater rate?”
No matter how far back you push it the fundamental question and responsibility remains unchanged. White people don’t get to wiggle out of this one by claiming “personal responsibility” and walking away.
”
“Why do people keep saying that? What relevance does that statistic have?”
Because people want to compare absolute numbers of shootings/arrests/etc to show that “there isn’t racism because more white people get it than black people” without accounting for the denominator of the actual population of the country.
Your question of “who is committing crimes” doesn’t eliminate the fundamental question, it just shifts it to “what biases might impact what is considered to be a ‘crime’ and whether/how people are charged and prosecuted for them?”
Even if minorities *do* commit violent crimes more than white people, the question then becomes “Why does the society *that white people built* drive minorities to commit crimes at a greater rate?”
No matter how far back you push it the fundamental question and responsibility remains unchanged. White people don’t get to wiggle out of this one by claiming “personal responsibility” and walking away.”
Wow, there was so much rationalizing and blame shifting in that response that I am honestly just in shock. I feel like I’ve taken crazy pills just trying to wrap my head around the fact that any sane adult could legitimately be trying to make the point you’re making.
If you have an alternate explanation for the observed differences between races in crime rates, incarceration rates, and fatal interactions with the police I’m happy to hear you out.
Mr. President, please stop logging into TTAC and get back to work.
it’s not him. Donny DeMango’s personal ballwashers are only too happy to be his parrots.
Were they speeding. It seems up to question since objective documentation (radar/laser, etc) is not reported.
But the real surprise is how seemingly tone deaf this policeman was. Do not the police have enough serious crime to deal with? Do they not want the average law abiding citizen on their side? 20% over the posted limit I can see but not over the limit within speedometer error not matter how it is documented. At a minimum the CHP gives you 10% on freeways and highways.
Spot on with your comments about traffic enforcement going for the low hanging fruit and not aggressively enforcing tailgating and weaving in and out of congested traffic.
I have been faced with this situation before and have never had the courage to pass. I usually just pull off, wait 10 minutes and the resume my travel. I also find myself at the speed limit occasionally tailgated by a law enforcement vehicle without flashing lights. I do not speed up but find a place to pull into another lane or pull off the road to let them pass.
The price of a speeding ticket is just the tip of the iceberg when other costs are added in.
” I also find myself at the speed limit occasionally tailgated by a law enforcement vehicle without flashing lights.”
I like to set the cruise control for about 3 under and just happily cruise along, guarantee I don’t make it 5 miles before the cop turns off or passes.
Going slower is as bad as going faster. If you’re going slower, they suspect you’re trying to hide something. I’ve seen drug busts occur when a car is staying very conspicuously below the speed limit.
Funny. I live in San Diego. So I see a lot of Mexican cars on the freeway. They are easy to spot because they will be driving exactly 55 when everyone else is passing them doing 75+.
I think they are afraid of being targeted by the CHP, so they reckon it is safer not to give the cops an excuse.
Makes sense. I drive carefully in Mexico for the same reason. I don’t want to give the cops an excuse to rob me.
” I also find myself at the speed limit occasionally tailgated by a law enforcement vehicle without flashing lights.”
—- If this happens to me in a cruise-control equipped vehicle, I set that cruise right on the spot and let the cop ride me as long as he wants. If I’m driving my truck (no cruise) I gradually… VERY gradually… slow down to about 5 under, forcing him to either back off to avoid hitting me or pass. Once past me and sufficiently far ahead (a couple hundred feet) I accelerate again and keep my distance behind him.
It’s easier to get objective documentation that stands up in court for speeding (and red light violations where there’s a camera) than anything else. DAs don’t want to waste time and money prosecuting a case that’s going to be contested.
Come on, we all know the 1 mph over the limit was bogus, the cop wanted something to ticket to teach this “punk” a lesson. If the driver had passed him under the speed limit he still would have gotten a ticket for something. If I’ve learned one thing in all my time of driving it is YOU DON’T PASS COPS. Unless you’re on a 4 way highway, any speed at which you pass them will be deemed excessive and an insult to the cop’s manhood.
(also, this story once again proves that any and all interactions with cops should be recorded)
Agreed. These stories seem be new, but do I think attitudes between police and citizens are different now? No, except there are video cameras in everyone’s pocket and a megaphone with infinite volume on the desk. Power to the people, indeed. As long as serve and protect doesn’t get confused with abuse of power, the playing field is flatter.
What’s “ballsy” is the cop issuing a ticket for 0.6mph over the limit, knowing full well that no judge in Canada would convict. You can beat the rap but you can’t beat the ride. The process is the punishment.
What’s even ballsier, is the cop’s supervisors’ explanation of his lying on the ticket, claiming he’d gotten a radar or laser reading when he’d only estimated the speed. They called it an “error”.
Quis custodiet and all that.
Some local lawyer should be challenging every ticket written (future) by said officer. They obviously have no problem lying on official documents, as seen in this case. If they did it once they are suspect in all future proceedings.
Please! Please! Please! Please put me on a jury with a Cop as a defendant!!!! PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yet when all hell breaks loose in our lives we are pretty glad they exist. In this “best of all possible worlds” we either have a police force or we have complete anarchy.
This defense get tiring in that the police refuse to police the police.
When “all hell breaks loose in my life” I’m potentially pretty glad that lots of people exist, depending on the circumstances.
I’ve had bad days when I didn’t have any use for a cop but was pretty happy to see a trauma nurse, or the guy who is equipped to deal with a rabid raccoon.
That doesn’t mean I give trauma nurses and trappers a free pass to harass, frame, and/or murder people with impunity.
Complete Anarchy is the unknown (to most) ideal. Doesn’t prevent people from hiring some cops to help out keeping things somewhat orderly. All it does, reduce the scope some have for imposing their, always self interested, idea of “orderly” on others.
SearMizok, It appears you’ve already drawn your conclusion, without examining the evidence. This is exactly why you shouldn’t be on any jury.
I just want the opportunity to give a Cop the same courtesy the cop has given me during a traffic stop.
I’m hearing that you want the nullify the checks and balances of the system. That doesn’t seem like a reasonable approach to solving the problem your perceive. It makes it worse.
First, you somehow have to have the cop prosecuted. That’s a vanishingly rare event. They usually have to kill another cop or a public official
Not the cop as a defendant, but as a witness for the prosecution.
That is my get out of jury duty forever card.
I served on a jury some years ago for a DUI case, and we found the defendant not guilty. The arresting cop was the big shot DUI cop who got all the accolades for getting piles of drunk drivers off the read.
Roll forward a few years, and that same cop was thrown off Tampa Police for a scam he was running with some divorce lawyers in town: set up a man for a DUI by having a young woman buy the man some drinks, bust him in the parking lot of a bar for DUI, and presto, the guy was on the bad end of a divorce settlement. Worked like a charm for years.
Well, then they tried the same scam with an attorney in a high profile civil case: (look up Schmidt versus Bubba the Love sponge for the sordid details.)
The cop from earlier case, was the self same, DUI busting Sargent Ray Fernandez. After all the lies and delays, Fernandez and 2 other officers were fired, and 3 attorneys were disbarred.
Whenever I get called for jury duty, I diligently show up, and I love the look on the attorney’s faces when they start asking me about my previous jury service:
“Mr. Attorney, my previous jury duty concerned a case involved Sgt. Ray Fernandez; isn’t he now a Brady cop?”
“This potential juror is dismissed!”
They can’t run me out of the courthouse fast enough. Sometimes I can’t even get lunch.
When officers like this don’t get disciplined for such abusive practices, it breeds disrespect for officers.
I’m sure Mr. Gagne is un upstanding citizen. Probably volunteers at an orphanage every Sunday too.
What does that matter? Maybe he drowns puppies for fun, or urinates on his neighbor’s roses, what bearing would any of that have in this situation?
He hurt nothing but the officer’s pride.
Something very similar happened to me about 20 years ago.
I dared to pass an slow-moving Allegheny County, PA cop. I was over the limit but within the usual speed of traffic and well below the 15 MPH unofficial threshold where you’ve earned your ticket.
There was no ticket, just a warning…which basically consisted of “you don’t pass a cop, do you understand?”
Bullies with a badge.
I guess its nice to see he was just messing with you but it does not excuse what was obviously an abuse of power. Allegheny County police are mostly useless, simply a holdover from decades past. Could keep a percentage, call them “airport police”, and deep six the rest of patrol. Their continued existence today is truly just a byproduct of the crony culture of this region.
“City officers cite better pay and the ability to live outside the city when taking jobs with suburban departments. Starting salary for a county police officer is $51,364 a year, but it increases to ***$77,995 after 18 months of service***. The starting rate for a city police officer is $42,548. A fourth-year officer makes $60,779, according to the 2014 city budget.”
triblive.com/news/allegheny/6048636-74/officers-police-county
$80K in 2014 to do virtually nothing for patrol, just cruise the four county parks looking for kids drinking, drugs, and people f**king (seriously), or guard the airport. Real American heroes. This and the boroughs are where the real police go after they make their bones, and for good reason as you can see. I have met people who went in after they turned 18, as there used to not be any education requirement beyond HS (i.e. A.S. in Criminal Justice). Nice pension after 20 with near zero risk of bodily harm if you could get in (for patrol and didn’t do SWAT, Bomb Squad, or become a Detective). Today there is a line and it is much more competitive.
Doesn’t seem to matter where you live, but minimal speeding is supposedly so terrible. However, any other obvious traffic offences are no big deal.
There are two major failures that has allowed traffic policing to degenerate from something arguably useful, to simply an extortion racket.
The first is the idiotic notion that some “crimes”/infractions/what have you, are not “serious” enough to warrant a proper jury trial (and ideally a grand jury indictment process), yet still “serious” enough to harass ostensibly free people over. Any stop like this, should require a prosecutor to prove, to a jury of twelve and beyond a reasonable doubt, that what Mr. Gagne did was truly endangering someone. Not just a judge arbitraily deciding to take some officer’s word for it, over Mr. Gagne’s.
The second is the back asswards incentives enabled, even encouraged, by monetary fines, instead of jail time/hanging/flogging/whatever. The supposed rationale used to justify harassing people over speeding, is that doing so makes the public safer. Safety is a good. Hence something that those receiving it, should pay for. In this case, in the form of paying to keep this “dangerous” man off the road and safely locked up.
Combine the two, and the cost of a proper trial, plus the cost of incarcerating those putting others in danger with their behavior, would go a long way to ensure frivolous nonsense like this does not take place. While still ensuring those that do pose a danger do get locked up. In the “system” we are stuck in, there is every encouragement for officers and their supporting circus, to simply run around attempting to shake down as many as you can, “danger to others” be damned, since doing so just brings more loot into the kitty, for distribution to insiders.
That only emphasizes the truism that you never pass a police officer on the highway. They will find SOME way to punish you for it.
So another police official perjures themselves in writing and walks away with impunity. More reason the police incorporate an us versus them attitude.
I’m not up on Canadian law but perjury may have a different definition there.
Welcome to Trump’s America.
Thank you for confirming your level of intelligence. Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to… how does that go again?
“But, last Friday, a ***Canadian*** motorist discovered you don’t have to be going all that quick to get a ticket. Mathieu Gagne was cruising behind a slow-moving police vehicle on a two-lane road in ***Alberta, Canada***, and decided to pass.”
@28-Cars-Later – looks like we have knee-jerk activity on both sides of the political isle which is why “we” collectively get the politicians we have.
It was a joke.
Hard to tell sometimes.
With Trudeau defending NAFTA to the death, and Trump windmilling at it with his sabre, it is truly an upside down world.
No, it’s really not. That was obvious.
The guy was a moron for taunting the cop. At what speed ABOVE the legal limit is the cop supposed to start enforcing the law? 5? 10? If we expect leeway it needs to be codified.
So an officer is allowed to falsely claim to have used radar and laser to track a vehicle’s speed and fill out an official document claiming as much. Even if they did not claim to have used radar and laser to get the speed how can someone claim to be able to estimate the speed of a car with 0.6 mph accuracy? And where is the taunting?
I would suspect that a 1 kph reading above the posted speed limit of 100 kph is within the error envelope of a radar gun .i.e. 1 %.
Police are allowed to issue a ticket based on estimation at least in Canada but 1 kph is indefensible in court.
Read the third from last paragraph (see below). The officer listed on the ticket that radar/laser was used but this is untrue so they are dismissing the ticket. I’m also unsure if the gun accuracy is that good from a moving vehicle.
“Upon further review, they did only estimate the driver’s speed and they did not record or measure it on a radar and laser as they indicated on the ticket,” Sturgeon County spokesperson Gwen Wolansky said.
I was issued a ticket for an incident that happened on a work site ( a guy tried to sneak through the equipment and I tagged his car with a grader. grader will always win ). The RCMP attended; reviewed the scene; and said a ticket would be forthcoming. When it arrived in the mail there was a checkmark in the box that stated ‘Hand-Delivered’…
It was thrown out of court. Those cops knew what they were doing.
When I was pulled over for speeding last Summer (first time in 15 years *dammit!*), the motorcycle officer was pretty cool, we talked bikes (he rode track as well at Turn 2 at Calabogie) knocked the fine down, no points, yadda, yadda. He explained that the vast majority of officers will not pull anyone over unless they are at least 10 KPH over the posted limit. Demerits come into play at 16 KMH over the limit.
As far as this situation, obviously this officer was in the wrong. I’ve passed many patrol cars on highways….never an issue, (even with OPP cruisers!) as long as I was within that 10 KMH over buffer.
I can’t speak for Canada but here I would call it a dick move at 1 kph (or 1 mph) and I would certainly challenge it. The vehicle itself may not be calibrated correctly for *exact* speed it is going and I know for a fact this can happen. I still had my Audi 100 when my one brother first entered the academy, we clocked it going four MPH slower than the speedo indicated.
Realistically if a US magistrate were to completely side with the defendant in this situation it would set too much of a precedent and I doubt it would happen (unless something like a black box could exonerate the defendant). However I would hope either LT or magistrate had a behind the scenes conversation with the officer. Making the police look poorly in media for no reason, when they were clearly wrong in this case, is not smiled upon.
There’s more going on than meets the eye here.
1. I don’t see on the ticket where they claimed to have used a radar and / or (which is it?) to track the speed.
2. Anyone writing a ticket for 1kph over knows it won’t hold up in court.
I suspect the officer knew nothing would come of the ticket and was just making a point when the driver passed like a complete arse. The officer may have been going easy on the guy. Instead, SMW galore.
If a cop has the time to issue penny ante tickets like this then it tells me the police department has too many cops and should start cutting back. The taxpayers pay for the police and an action like what is described is trivial. Obviously the police man in this article had too much time on his hands and he was not actually needed to protect the public. Time for some budget cuts to save the taxpayers from wasteful and unnecessary expenditures.
“peace officer” is not a police officer. I looked up the Alberta definition,
“A Public Security Peace Officer (PSPO) is a person who works to uphold and enforce certain laws and regulations in Alberta. A PSPO is given limited powers and authority, under the current Alberta Peace Officer Act (May, 2007). They are not to be confused with Police Officers, who have a much wider range of authority.”
Under that definition we could have municipal/city bylaw enforcement and animal control. Ministry of transport vehicle inspectors would also be under that definition.
So was this really a police officer? RCMP handle most of the law enforcement in Alberta with Calgary and Edmonton having their own municipal force.
Alberta has Sheriff Highway Patrol officers who help out the RCMP to catch speeders beyond city limits. They are defined as peace officers not police, so one supposes that some county “enforcement” clerk, er supervisor, can void one of their tickets. Can’t see an RCMP ticket being voided by some county knob or another unless that’s part of the deal they have with the Sheriff Highway Patrol, but who knows what rules they cooked up together back in 2006 when it all started. The county makes about 25% of the face ticket value, the province 55% and Victim Fund the rest. God knows if the courts skim some off the top before the rest is distributed.
Passing anyone going almost at the speed limit on a two lane road is never wise, and if it’s an obvious “cop” and you’re in a hurry to do 5 klicks more, well you’re one dang impatient guy.
As far as the rest of the whingeing here is concerned, who cares.
I’m thinking Sheriff as well since I’ve seen them doing speed enforcement in the National Parks. I didn’t mention sheriffs because ours function differently than US ones.
Alberta is the red-neck capital of Canada. If it was going to happen anywhere here, it was going to happen there. Canadian cops got attitude, but even this is extreme.
This raises a question that would seem to have fundamental importance, but which, so far as I know, is not mentioned in the article or comments. Nor does it seem to be addressed in highway laws.
Are you allowed to exceed the speed limit while passing?
Seems to me the traffic laws were drawn up back when a lot of people drove below the speed limit and so this was not an issue. Nowadays virtually everyone drives 10kph over the limit, with many going even faster.
To pass the rare motorist doing the speed limit requires speeding. So is that a violation and has anyone been ticketed for non-excessive speeding while passing?
@brandloyalty – one isn’t allowed to exceed the posted speed limit when passing so in actual fact the driver in the story had violated the law. The “peace officer” did not follow due diligence when he issued the traffic violation.
It was dumb for the driver to pass and even dumber as to how the officer discharged his duties.
1 KMH. ONE.
That’s under the precision in most stock speedometers.
@operagost – I’m not defending the officer since they are supposed to allow for “device” inaccuracy.
I just answered brandloyalty’s question.
You aren’t legally allowed to exceed the posted speed limit unless in an emergency vehicle with audible warning signals and visible warning lights i.e. lights and sirens.
I never pass a cop. And this is the reason why. It’s not going to kill me to stay behind a slow moving cop for a while. If I’m that bothered, I’ll just pull off somewhere for a minute or two.
Prime example of power abuse and how the internet does good quickly. Nice!
A police officer abusing his power? Perish the thought.