Sometimes technology lets you down in the most frustrating way.
When I’m driving home, there’s a turn I have to make pretty regularly that is prohibited by a “No Left Turn” sign after 4 pm. As I approached the turn yesterday, it was 3:44, which is right at my limit. Any closer than that, and I skip the turn and go home the long way. I took the turn and drove home without incident. But it got me thinking…
I use a fifteen minute safety margin because of the time my friend Ken parked his car in a spot that became no parking after 5 pm, and when he went to move his car at 4:55, he found a parking ticket with the time filled-in as 5:15. I figure that some cop could pull me over 10 minutes early and fudge the time on the ticket just to pump up his activity for the day. Even though I keep my watch synchronized within a few seconds of true Central Time, that’s not an argument I can win. After all, he’s the one filling out the ticket.
Today, however, I thought I might have a solution. My mobile phone has a built-in camera. I hardly ever use it because I have better ways to take pictures, but here was a use for it: I could take a picture of the ticket.
That would establish that the ticket existed before the time at which it was supposedly written. There’s no way to fake the timestamp because the phone sets its internal clock from the cellular network. It can’t be set by the user. It would prove that the cop is a liar and the citation is a fraud.
I have no idea how well this would work in traffic court. Could I just show the judge my cell phone and zoom in on the citation number? Would the judge know that I can’t set the time? Would he follow through to the logical conclusion, or would he just “weigh the evidence” and decide that I was still guilty? Actually, having read some horror stories by legal bloggers, I’m not entirely sure the judge wouldn’t get pissed off at me for suggesting the cop is lying.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I took a picture with my mobile phone and pulled up the “Details” display, and it turns out the phone only shows the date the picture was taken, not the time.
The darned phone can record memos, play ringtones, surf the web, and download games, but some programmer somewhere decided that showing the time a picture was taken would be too much work.
Having served 20 years as a uniformed cop I find it slightly amusing that some folks think this way. I wrote tickets, quite a few. If I made a mistake I would call the person at home and tell them to send me their copy so I could void it out, show up in court where I would explain the error and have it dismissed. I once had a watch with a button on the side that changed the date in the window. Somehow it got pushed in between the first ticket I wrote a guy and the second ticket I wrote. I never noticed it until later that day when I was filling out my work card. I thought it odd that two differnt dates showed up in one day. It was a minor point of law but I called the guy at home and we both had a good laugh.
I’m not saying that some cops might stretch the truth, be poor observers or any number of reasons for going to court; however, it has been my experience that most cops go the extra mile in doing what is right. Some have a very small window of “grace”, such as “rolling stops” at stop signs, just a few miles over the posted speed limit radar tickets and other chicken shit tickets that get written. All that being said, I would hope my point gets across that a huge majority of the tickets written are justified and the idea that it would be considered even slightly that cops lie to make their work card look better is not only improbable; it’s insulting.