While traveling up Hicks Lane to the Old Village, I saw two Kings Point police units with cars pulled over for ticketing. Didn’t think much of it, ticket blitzes are common enough, until, traveling on the way back, I was pulled over myself!
The officer said I ran a stop sign. Which came as a surprise to me, especially since I’m not exactly prone to that activity, and after 50 years of licensure, I have been up and down Hicks Lane perhaps 1,000 times before.
What may have been the violation is that the stop itself may not have been like the one you do with a Driver Ed teacher in the seat next to you. Except nobody really drives like that in real life, and I’m not exactly a menace to society on the road. Over 500,000 miles driven without an accident says so.
I mean, it would be the height of stupidity to willfully run a stop sign after watching two police SUVs working like beavers on that stretch of road.
As the officer was writing the ticket, I noticed the other unit with yet another victim pulled over, different from the one he had written up on my way into town. These guys were ticketing anything that moved.
“Well, Gol’ darn it. What we have he’ah is a regulah chrahm wave of irrisPONsible reckless Yankee drivuhs comin’ through our little town! Whah, Magnolia honey, ah DO believe they are givin’ me a case of the chill blains!”
The officer seemed to be in a foul mood. He glowered at my window stickers like he was reading a death sentence, his face contorted in an angry scowl.
While he was in his unit writing me up, I realized this was nothing but a case of legalized pickpocketing that petit bureaucrats like to indulge themselves in. The officer handed me the ticket, I tossed it on my passenger seat like a used burger wrapping, engaged first gear, and drove off without a word.
I saw the twisted, glowering scorn on that officer’s face in my side-view mirror as I pulled away. I had just committed a Class A felony: failure to genuflect. But I was not going to be bothered with the time-honored Requisite Display of Simpering Contrition the officer felt he deserved. If you want respect, Buster, you remember that door swings both ways.
I’m out $243 so I can pay for a police force in an area where one isn’t needed that has to pretend it’s performing real law enforcement in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the United States.
I guess they must be desperate for revenue in Kings Point. Maybe Tom DiNapoli should audit the village and see where the money is going to. (Just kidding. Tom never audits people he can’t step on.)
When you think the grift machine can’t stoop any lower, Nassau County’s degenerate culture of governance manages to outdo itself.
As criminal as state Assemblyman Charles Lavine’s and “Judge” John Marks rigged red light camera grift, the pretense offered by these “stepped up enforcement” actions is that they’re protecting not only the public but us from ourselves.
Unfortunately, it costs money to keep up the pretense, so they’re left to invent offenses as they go along, and mechanisms to fund them. These actions also feed public resentment and undermine the respect they crave.
Some people in “public service” seem to believe the term means the public serves them. They had better understand that every morsel of food they put in their mouths, every stitch of clothing on their backs, comes from the fruit of our labors. We shouldn’t be paying them to harass us under such specious pretenses.
If this is what you need to do to justify your existence, all it means is you’re not needed in the first place.
I’m not your ATM. The residents of Kings Point can pay for their own private force.
Donald Davret
Roslyn
