[freehunter]

This is an anecdote from me, but that's all most people in this thread have, so... One day I was sitting in an empty parking lot with my girlfriend eating pizza on the tailgate and watching traffic go by. A cop came along and ticketed a driver for rolling through the stop sign. As soon as the cop turned off her lights, another car rolled through the stop sign, and she lit that driver up as well. This continued for probably 5-10 drivers before the officer came up to us and asked if we were enjoying the show. She said she hopes everyone involved learned a lesson about stopping completely at stop signs. I offered her a slice of pizza, she declined, and we drove off.

I guess my take-away from that was, cops can give out tickets in short order if people are consistently breaking the law right in front of them. I wouldn't necessarily punish an officer for giving out many tickets in a high-offending area, just based on what I saw that day. Sometimes people in an area need to have the rules reinforced. For every driver that got pulled over, 20 other drivers were witness.

[wpietri]

My take would be that if there's an intersection where people are doing that many rolling stops, then it's probably perfectly safe. In my neighborhood people do that all the time at certain spots as long as they're the only one near the intersection.

If those people were driving safely, then ticketing them for a technical violation of the law probably isn't helping anything. The point of tickets is to punish the unsafe drivers so that they learn a lesson and have a record that makes it easier to reform or weed out the really bad ones.

So a cop that spends all day writing tickets on technical violations probably should get a talking to from their superiors. They're wasting their time and ticking off solid citizens while actual unsafe behavior gets a pass.