[js2]

Back in my younger years, I was stopped at a light when a guy pulled up next to me and revved his engine, an invitation to drag to the next light. I revved my engine back. Light turns green, we race to the next light. I see a cop put on their lights behind us.

Now we're both stopped at the light with the cop coming up behind us. I'm on the inside lane. The guy next to me decided he's going to try to run from the cop and makes a right turn.

Cop pulls up beside me, shouts at me "pull around the corner and wait for me" then goes off after the other guy.

So I pulled around the corner and waited for her. She did manage to catch the other guy down the street. About 15 minutes later she comes over to me and says: "I can't believe you did what I asked. I had your plate and would've tracked you down. Don't let me catch you drag racing again. I'm letting you go with a warning."

[dsfyu404ed]

If she'd have tracked you down the prosecutor would have then had to prove it was you in the driver's seat for any sort of moving violation to stick. In an age before ubiquitous 4k surveillance this would have been a tall order.

[xeromal]

Sounds like a lot of extra work instead of facing the consequence you brought upon yourself by drag racing.

[js2]

In my experience, and I used to get pulled over a lot, being courteous and respectful to an officer is sufficient to avoid a speeding citation with 50% success rate.

[ParetoOptimal]

If you are white, maybe.

However, I noticed that after growing long hair more citations would stick too.

[tpoacher]

Also depends on the car you drive.

Anecdotally, my brother decided to splurge on his childhood dreamcar (a BMW Z3, second hand of course). He found that he started getting stopped for "random checks" once every couple of trips on the motorway. The probability would also be much higher if the car was freshly washed and shiny.

He then switched back to a normal, more "boring" car, and the "random checks" stopped.

[ParetoOptimal]

Yep, I've noticed car choice mattering for myself and others as well.

Reflecting back to my original comment:

I guess my goal besides sharing my opinion was wanting to communicate to people who seemed to have the "just be polite and respectful view" is that factors like these make the predictability of politeness or respectability affecting the outcome at all way more variable.

Sometimes to the point of not mattering at all.

[js2]

FWIW, I'm white and very aware that it may be different if you are not. I thought about it when writing my comment but decided I m just didn't want to drag it into this discussion.

In my experience, it never hurts to be polite and respectful, though even as a white person I've had run-ins with officers who were either in a bad mood or just jerks and no amount of good will on my part seemed to matter. So it didn't help, but giving them lip would've just antagonized them further.

So yeah, maybe it doesn't help. But I can't imagine it would ever hurt.

And finally: I can only reflect my experience as a middle-class middle-aged married straight white Jewish male who's lived a relatively privileged life. I acknowledge that in its entirety. And I'm certainly interested in hearing other folks' experiences and learning from them. If someone wants to chime in about that time they were polite and respectful and it made the situation somehow worse, I'm all ears.

[dsfyu404ed]

And old. And not poor. And preferably a woman.

Poor, young, black and male are the high crime demographics that get drilled into officers' heads at the academy. People checking more than one of those boxes rarely catch a break.

[ashton314]

And probably 50% off the times when you don’t get a citation, the ticket is reduced.

[josephcsible]

> the prosecutor would have then had to prove it was you in the driver's seat for any sort of moving violation to stick.

Obviously in a fair system, this would have to be true, but in today's system, is it actually true? Don't a lot of speed cameras automatically mail out tickets by license plate, and it's just assumed that if you're the owner, you're also the driver, unless you can prove someone else actually was?

[WirelessGigabit]

In the USA it depends by state. Many East Coast counties have speed cameras and red light cameras.

California doesn't have speed cameras but certain jurisdictions have red light cameras. And it depends by jurisdiction whether you have to pay or send it to /dev/null.

In Arizona I know of Scottsdale having speed cameras. Not sure how they get around the legality.

In Germany they take a photo of the front of your car, so your face is on it... Unless you drive there with a left-hand drive car: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081607/Speeding-pu...

In Belgium it's way worse. Picture of the back of your car and you have to pay. No way around it. In fact, if you want to fight the ticket you need to pay to see the photo. How's that for discovery?

[klyrs]

Amusingly, identical twins still get off the hook for this. And I read on HN recently that in places with particularly egregious automatic enforcement, it becomes popular to wear a ski mask while driving

[emodendroket]

Yeah that would be pretty effective unless the person being pursued had removed the plates or something.