If there’s one traffic crime police like to crack down on, it’s speeding. Catching offenders is relatively straightforward, dishing out fines is easy, and prosecuting the crime is by-and-large a slam dunk. Few motorists have any wiggle room to fight back against such charges, but the Iowa State Patrol just gave a bunch of speeders a chance to dispute their tickets.
You see, last weekend was a big one for the Iowa State Patrol. Troopers were out working a “speed project” on I-35 between Oralabor and 1st street. The troopers stopped 30 cars for speeding, and one driver was even jailed after they were allegedly caught doing a mighty 144 mph.
There was just one problem. When the State Patrol posted to Facebook, they revealed one little mistake. The stopwatch they were using was set to kilometers instead of miles.
Think before you post.
Oopsie
Given that a driver was allegedly caught speeding at 144 mph, the story made the news in a ton of outlets across Iowa. WOC1420, Local 5 News, and WHO13 all ran with the news of a speeder caught doing 144 mph in a 65 mph zone. Police quoted the driver, Thomas Peterson, as saying his reason for speeding was that he “wanted to have a little fun.” His 2009 BMW was towed, and he was charged with speeding and reckless driving.
This is where the story gets interesting. Iowa State Patrol wanted to boast about its big win on the weekend, and posted an image to Facebook. The measurements weren’t taken using a radar or lidar speed gun. Instead, the post showed the stopwatch that police were using to time drivers over a set distance in order to figure out their speed—a technique called VASCAR, or Visual Average Speed Computer And Recorder. The stopwatch, a Robic SC-899 Triple Timer model, was showing a speed of 144… kilometers per hour.
This naturally led numerous commentators to call out the operation as a farce. Many pointed out that 144 km/h is actually just 90 mph—still speeding, but to a far less egregious amount. However, the truth may be a touch more complex. Let’s take a closer look at the stopwatch and the math.
Basically, the Robic SC-899 is just a stopwatch that does a little extra math. You tell it the distance you’re timing over, and it’ll calculate the speed of an object based on how long it takes to travel that distance. We can see the stopwatch is displaying the “KM” unit, indicating it is set to kilometers. This is what triggered the controversy. The stopwatch reads 6.25 seconds, and displays a speed of 144 km/h. If we work backwards, we can calculate the distance the stopwatch is set to measure over.
Well, would you look at that—we can see the programmed distance comes out to a perfect 0.25 kilometers (0.15 miles). Here’s where you need to do a little thinking. What sounds more likely—did the police plan to measure speeders over an 0.15-mile stretch, and then accidentally switch the stopwatch into kilometers without noticing? Or did they intend to measure over a quarter-mile (0.25 miles) and just entered it as kilometers by mistake? I’d wager the latter. Particularly given this particular stopwatch doesn’t have a way to switch units after initial setup. In any case, The Autopian has reached out to the Iowa State Patrol for comment.
The thing is, it actually doesn’t matter whether you have the SC-899 stopwatch set to kilometers or miles, as long as you’re consistent. If you enter the measured distance in miles, the output will be in miles, even if you told the stopwatch you’re working in kilometers. The stopwatch is just dividing the distance by time. If you do 0.25 units of distance divided by 6.25 seconds, you get 0.04 units of distance per second—which equals 144 units of distance per hour. If you meant miles when you keyed it in, you’re reading an answer in miles per hour. If you meant kilometers, you’re getting kilometers per hour. There’s also nothing in the stopwatch manual about changing the displayed units after initial setup—so it’s not like they just hit a button and switched from km/h to mph.
Given that the US is so obsessed with miles—and quarter-miles specifically—it seems far more likely that the police were measuring over this distance, and just ignored the units. If they punched in 0.25 for a quarter mile, the resulting speed would be in miles, and everything would be all good. To actually measure wrongly would require more effort. To get the results seen here, you’d have to be measuring over a distance of 0.15 miles, but enter it as 0.25 kilometers. Then you’d have to forget to convert the results back to miles after reading them off the stopwatch.
The fact is that this questionable post could give speeders some wiggle room to challenge their tickets. In posting this image, the Iowa State Patrol has created questions about whether they were using their equipment properly. There are a great many comments out there already calling them out for this very fact. If the State Patrol can prove it was measuring over two points that were indeed 0.25 miles apart, they shouldn’t have any problems. Still, they’ll have to go over this long-winded explanation in court just like I have done here.
The Iowa State Patrol didn’t make the same mistake when they did this back in June. Indeed, you note that they measured about 6.61 seconds and the result came out as 136 mph—suggesting an 0.25-mile measurement distance. Measurements are usually made via specific road markings that are painted at regular 0.25-mile intervals.
Ultimately, you’d hope that those doing speed enforcement are setting their gear up correctly. Particularly where public perception is a concern. Motorists hate getting speeding tickets at the best of times. It’s all the more frustrating when it feels inaccurate, unjustified, or unfair.
Image credits: Iowa State Patrol, FlightRadar
The stupidity of using a plane to catch speeders has always been hilarious to me. Like, this operation ran over the course of a weekend, so let’s say it was running 8 hours per day for 3 days. They need a plane with at least a pilot and a trooper; they probably have at least another two or three cars on the ground to go after the people they’re clocking in the air. That Cessna is going to cost something like $200/hr to run, plus the cost of fuel for the ground vehicles and wages for the pilot and everyone on the ground; ballpark a minimum of, what, $400/hr to run this “operation”?They pulled over a whopping 30 speeders over the course of the weekend, so a little over 1 per hour. I get that speeding tickets are expensive, but when the cost of running your sad little sting operation is in the 10s of thousands of dollars, how does that make any sense? Congrats, dorks, you succeeded in catching a handful of people driving, like, 10 over the speed limit and a single person significantly speeding.
[long, slow clap.gif]
Taxpayers bear the cost, the PD pockets the fines. Why do you hate America?
144? That’s gross!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dENYJbN1z4
Interesting because my favorite trend lately has been watching cops getting forced into a deposition and squirming under hard questions for violating peoples rights.
Last night I seen one where they knocked on a guys door for a knock-n-chat with no warrant and when the guy said he didnt want to talk they arrested him for obstruction. After that watched them bust a sign out of a protesters hand while his partner was recorded from behind turning the protesters tripod away so he wouldnt have evidence. They got depositioned and asked some hilariously harsh questions and couldnt simply chest-thump their way out of it.
Used to be they could falsely arrest you and you would not “beat the ride”. Nowadays us citizens now have a similar tool where we can sue and get the officer into a deposition and then make them look like fools and release it all over youtube. Even if they beat the case they cant beat that public humiliation so remember this boys and girls.
Many highways have white hash marks on the shoulder to mark the start and end of the measured distance. I looked at this section of highway on Google Maps, but don’t see any marks. There are, however, some overhead signage structures that could maybe be used. I was hoping that there would be hash marks that would be 0.25 miles apart, but I couldn’t find them. If I was fighting this in court, though, I’d be challenging the accuracy and human error rate of manually calculating this, especially if the distance markers were not clearly identifiable.
If I were a driver, arrested for doing 144mph, but only doing 90 mph, my response to the cops would not have been “having a little fun”. It would be “what is this bullshit?” Based on that factor alone, I am inclined to say this guy knew he was doing in excess of 140mph and as the article states, the math works out either way.
Or, the supposed quote from driver as stated by the state troopers is complete BS.
In the part of California where I live, a hair less than 90mph is pretty much the flow of traffic.
I think the real question here is why there are units on the stopwatch at all, if all it’s doing is time/distance? It changes nothing about the calculation, as pointed out in the article, so why the complication?
The more important question is why are they using stopwatches at all. That is a pretty easily errored method, but they make those little traffic speed Radar things that just sit on the side of the road, add a camera aiming toward whatever car is being tracked and the result is much less fallible and easier to prove in court.
I will say that in my experience, especially in Ankeny just to the north of this location, the cops there never seem to admit wrong, even when it is blatant.
The fact that the stopwatch is easily errored is the point.
Especially over just a 1/4 mile, the human reaction time is going to cause a huge margin of error.
Start the timer a fraction of a second late and stop it a smidge early and you can turn misdemeanor speeding into felony speeding.
The margin of error at 1/4 mile is larger than you think.
60 mph = 15.0 s
65 mph = 13.8 s
70 mph = 12.8 s
75 mph = 12.0 s
80 mph = 11.3 s
85 mph = 10.6 s
90 mph = 10.0s
They likely aren’t ticketing with this technique any less than 75 mph. I’d wager they have some rule that any time longer than 11.5 s is ignored–treating is as not speeding–as a bit of factor of safety. I don’t think cops are very smart, but a policy this simple seems obvious. Surely they can press start/stop within a close enough of a margin that half-a-second margin of error is maintained.
My question is “Why are they using a manually operated stopwatch over such a short distance?” One second’s mistake (if it’s a mistake) over 0.15 miles is an 11% error at 60 mph.
If the cops are smart (LOLOLOL “cops” and “smart” in the same sentence), they’ll be videoing the roadways, and the stopwatch is just used as a rough ballpark. They make sure people are going faster than a specific margin of error to keep from potentially charging people who aren’t speeding at all, ticket them on the ground, and use the video recording as evidence in the unlikely event that the person contests the fine in court. Simple math on a video recording — it takes the car X number of frames to go .25 mi; 1 frame = 1/30th or 1/60th of a second; maths out the mph from there. At worst, there’s a minor adjustment to the amount of the speeding fine.
yeah, this is the only way it makes sense – a human pressing a stopwatch button isn’t likely to stand up at trial
I remember when I rented a car in Southern Ireland where speed limits are in km/hr and I drove to Northern Ireland where the speed limits changed to mi/hr but didn’t include the units on the sign and there were automatic speed enforcement cameras everywhere. So I was constantly getting honked at while I thought I was going the speed limit but was going 40% slower. The most stressful driving experience of my life. To top it off the ford focus I rented only had km/hr on the speedo which was odd because all the cars we have in the USA generally have both scales.
A stopwatch? Yeah nah, we’d be taking that fight all the way to the Supreme Court if it was me.
I mean unless you could prove that they were aggressively shorting the time to get the speeds higher, I don’t think you’re going to get too far in the courts fighting this based on the use of a stopwatch alone. If you have a dash cam that records speed and data confirming its accuracy, maybe you could prove that you were unfairly ticketed, but otherwise this is an acceptable way to calculate speed, legally.
I wondered what happened to those Mars Climate Observer engineers…
Bwahaha!
I have an old speeding ticket that claims I was doing 168mph in a 55. I don’t know why he wrote a 1 in front of the 68, but I kept it because it’s badass!
what the hell – .25 KM is 400 meters. Awfully small sample. The guy doing 90 was always going to get nailed, but passing someone doing 5 under (sorry, 8 KPH under) in the center lane, would eat up most of that distance even if you only accelerated to 75 (120K), and 75 to pass should only get you ticketed in a 55 or slower section
.25 KM is 400 meters
Huh? If there are 1000 meters in a kilometer, 0.25km is 250 meters. That is indeed a pretty short baseline, though I’m not aware of any legal speed limits that care how long the distance is.
Instead of spending almost all that time and money focusing on speeding, I would prefer if they spent a greater portion of their time enforcing all the other road laws like “keep right except to pass”, enforcing min/max bumper heights on lifted trucks, nailing coal rollers and nailing Harley owners with unmuffled pipes that are technically illegal.
And tires out past the body work, and unsecured loads, and riding on the highway on a totally bald donut spare
But they need the revenue from ticketing speeders to fund the planes and stings and equipment they use to catch speeders!
At any rate, speeding shouldn’t be illegal in Iowa; they’re clearly just trying to get to a different state, any state, that isn’t Iowa. It’s the humanitarian choice to let them go.
I feel this way about Oklahoma on 44/40. Highly patrolled, and it goes on forever. I just want out of there!!!
Speeding is the greater public danger.
Speeding tickets are the greater ROI.
Yeah but loud pipes save lives.
Not that I know how me being awoken at 6:30am on Saturday would help save THEIR lives.
And headlight height/aim. Unfortunately, pedestrian-killer front ends, restricted vision due to A-pillar or hood, distraction due to entertainment center/stereo or hands-free phone, non-yellow turn signals, and being unable to hear other vehicles/sirens due to hermetically sealed cabin (windows all closed), are all perfectly legal in the good ol’ USA.
But all those other things are hard.
They might involve actually driving, monitoring, measuring, and most importantly, knowing the nuance of the law. That sounds hard.
Don’t forget tailgating!
Harley riders and brodozers are just off-duty cops, or like minded thumb-shaped man-boys.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” – Francis Wilhoit
When I was a door to door salesman, we had to measure off lawns so we knew how to price the service and so the techs would know how much product to take on a route.
The manager bought a bunch of measuring wheels in meters. When we got them, I told him, hey, these things are in meters. Everything we do is in square feet. Everyone needs to know they need to at least multiply each dimension by three to get close. He and the sales team called me a nerd, poindexter, etc.
Then sales came in with massive discrepancies. 9000 square foot lawns measured at 30 by 30 and sold at the lowest price, 1500 sq ft. The techs were furious and we lost customers since we couldn’t possibly continue to honor a sixfold oversize lawn. Instead of getting new wheels or even instructing the team to remember their wheels are in meters (which, again was entirely his fault), he just yelled at the team to stop underbilling or undermeasuring.
Good to know he moved on to procuring equipment and providing training for Iowa State Patrol.
~11 fold not 6 fold. Pedantic I know but it better reinforces your point. 1 m^2 =10.76 ft^2
Eh yeah, I was thinking of the 1500 sq ft size and price floor, not the actual 30m x 30m to 9000 sq ft conversion. Point taken though.
Nah units of measurement don’t matter. I mean what if someone filling a plane with fuel made a similar mistake? Oh wait https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
Stopwatches don’t measure distance.
As long as they can prove how they measured distance, there is still nothing to appeal.
It’s a window of a shadow of doubt. You can get tickets thrown out on improperly calibrated or deployed equipment, though 144 of mph vs kph is the difference between a bad look versus imprisonment and impoundment, which is worth fighting over.
Actually, it’s a tachometer, which has been a feature of stopwatches since at least the 1960s. That’s what the outermost markings on those Omega Speedmaster wrist watches that they took to the moon are.
If you know how fast something is moving, stopwatches are an excellent way of measuring distance.
Where is Chronometric to explain?
Watches typically have a tachymeter, not a tachometer.
Crap., I blame the iPhone Otto Spill feature, you are of course, correct.
Speaking of the iPhone, why isn’t there a tachymeter app?
I thought that most U.S. spec BMW’s had top speed limiters well below 144 mph. There are a few models with higher limiters…..and we don’t know the model here, but that’s the first evidence I’m introducing at my jury trial.
Why would you do that when they’ve already proven it was 144 kph? Your speed limiter argument won’t help against a 90mph charge though.
The point of this article was that it still could have been 144 mph
I baffles me that America still hasn’t converted to Metric. And, yet, is somehow proud of it.
Suppose it’s better than the right mess in the UK where you might get a response in kilograms, pounds, or even stones!
It is good to have options. You can go over a weight scale and choose the unit that makes you happier:176 lbs, hell I am fat, 80 kgs, not bad, 12,6 stones: this, much better…
At this point, there’s too much momentum. All of the roads are measured in miles, all the onramps, the street blocks, etc… Just changing signs would be a massive undertaking. Oh well.
You’d think it could be an easy sell to some poorly-informed folks at the pump: “Wow, look, the price just dropped 70% by switching to Metric!”
As an American I agree that we should adopt the metric system… for everything but temp.
Nah man! We gotta go all the way and use Kelvin. It only makes sense to peg temp to water’s freezing and boiling point if there’s precipitation. And it’s never hot enough to boil it anyway. Not yet.
Good lord, why? Celsius is so much easier: 0 degress is the freezing point of water, 100 is the boiling point. So when you say “10 below freezing” it’s actually 10 below zero. So simple.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’ve come to peace with the Fahrenheit scale for ambient temperatures. It’s a scale of useful distribution for the human experience, in which we can mostly map out what we experience on a scale of 0 to 100. With Celsius, everything is compressed into the space of 40 degrees or so, and it makes it harder to quickly establish relative temperatures.
I say all this as an American, so my opinions on this are automatically worthless, but I can see a value in a handy 0-100 scale, even if it’s not rooted in scientific rigor or easy interoperability.
The Fahrenheit scale was actually designed for that as they picked 0 deg to be freezing of (non-pure) water and body temperature for the 100 scale.
The difference in a degree of Celsius on a home thermostat is the difference between sweating and being too cold. Even in Europe they have acknowledged this since their thermostats operate in half degrees. If you have to split your base measurement in half in order for it to be useful, it’s not useful.
Fahrenheit is so much better for typical everyday use though. 0F=really cold, 100F=really hot. It’s so much more obvious than Celsius.
Now, Celsius makes more sense for science, because the freezing point of water being 0 and the boiling point being 100 makes more sense there, but in day to day life, what the fuck does it matter if water boils at 100 or 212? It doesn’t, because you don’t really need to know that when it comes to boiling pasta or what clothing might be appropriate.
Thank you.
Fahrenheit is calibrated for human beings and weather, Celsius is calibrated for water.
Here in Canada we kind of have a hybrid system that evolved organically. I am 6 foot three, I weigh….uh, let’s not talk about that, I drive 20 kms to work, and I buy 2x4s at Home Depot and drive home to enjoy a litre of cola, with ice that freezes at 0 degrees Celsius. Works great for us.
Yeah learned metric in school but imperial at home, I do temp in C now and distance in KM but people are in feet and inches as well as any projects I do, I don’t even have a metric tape measure.
Such is the peril of being close to America.
Driving distance in time “I’m an hour from Toronto”
Oven is in F, unless you’re in Quebec.
Indoor temperature unit is dependent on how old your thermostat at home might be.
Outdoor temperatures are metric
Groceries advertised in pounds, but charged in metric (Costco excepted)
Fuel consumption for Stellantis products in Imperial MPG (so it looks good next to USMPG), but every other automaker uses metric
etc…
You can’t be a true Canadian. You didn’t measure your commute in time.
We tried to in the 80’s, it didn’t work out, probably too hard for people and machine tools at the time.
Yeah because we didn’t stick with it. It’s going to be a rough transition period, but the standard system is such a mess and I hate it. I would jump at the chance to switch to metric! Though yeah the costs involved in doing so are large. What’s another coupld trillion to the national debt at this point am I right?
In college homework was given in metric and then the professor would screw everyone up by making the tests in imperial. With cnc tools and cad now of days it should be easier to switch but we still have fasteners and steel dimensions that would make it almost impossible.
Even if we switched people will still screw up the metric system with units like kg_force. I quoted a gas compressor to a customer giving me pressure in terms of kg_force/cm^2 which is close to a Newton/M^2 (Pa) but not the same. WTF!?
Radar seems to work a lot better, without manually starting and stopping a stopwatch, which leads to error. The short distance increases the error in speed calculation. Time a car over a whole mile, or four of those marked stretches (five marks, actually).
Anyway, the defendant needs to go out and measure the distance used in his speed trap. Someone might have noted that the stopwatches come “only in km/h” and thought, “hey, we need to mark off 0.25km, not miles.”
Looking for any markers via Googls Maps, finding none.
Ooh, the I-35 intersection with East 1st Street is one of them fancy intersections!
Look: it’s NOT rocket science….
Oh damn. Never mind.
https://everydayastronaut.com/mars-climate-orbiter/
Imagine for a second, a simple conversion error from Metric to Imperial units. Now imagine that this error caused a multi-million dollar mission to go puff! A video released by Everyday Astronaut this week looks at how NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. Both the video and this article explore how NASA’s team made a math boo-boo. It cost them the mission just as it approached Mars.
Came here for this, not disappointed.
That’s a great article that illustrates a rather different point nicely- the fuck-up on the climate orbiter was entirely due to NASA management. Was there a units error? Yes, but the fact that there was an error of some sort was noticed in time to do something about it, but NASA managers assumed they knew better.
You don’t expect perfection in engineering, in fact in many disciplines you are required by law to assume failure and design for the consequences. That one single source of error was allowed to destroy the probe is absolutely unacceptable- if it wasn’t a units switch then it could have been a bad sensor or bearing causing the additional rotational magnitude, the inability of mission control to deal with it is a hideous failure.
“Radar seems to work a lot better, without manually starting and stopping a stopwatch, which leads to error.”
Why not both?
Enough reasonable doubt to get the ticket thrown out.
Why? 90 mph is still speeding.
Lawyers gonna lawyer, thats why
one of the most important take-aways from having been educated as an engineer to always double-check the units.
that’s probably not a point of emphasis at the state police academy.
As a practicing engineer and mentor I always tell the kids (i.e. new engineers) to have an expected range of results in mind. If the reading does not match your expectation, pause and figure out if something is wrong.
I’d think traffic cops of all people should know most cars cannot do 144MPH. They could have saved themselves from public ridicule here.
That’s why we need more STEM mentality.
The reasonableness test was drilled into our heads in Eng school. The physics and Chem profs also subscribe to the principle. As to speeding, just dont, you are saving seconds to minutes on a commute and risking tickets, higher insurance, accidents all for what? I use my cruise control obsessively and have a perfect driving record, pay low rates for my insurance. If I want to go fast there are three race tracks nearby where I can indulge.
I once did the math on my former commute and figured out that doing 10 over saved me 2 minutes & some odd seconds. Getting up a few minutes earlier has been way cheaper than all those tickets and the insurance rates
Mine was the same. My commute was 45 km / 28 mi one way. Weather ranged from eastern ontario hot and humid to -40 C / -40 F. Lots of blizzards and rainstorms mixed in with idiots in a hurry. Driving at 125-130km/hr / 85 mph saved me a whopping 8-10 minutes once I hit the city bumper to bumper traffic about half way to the office. The car also gets much better economy at 60-65 which is about the average traffic speed. I’d put on some tunes, and organize my workday in my head.
If they weren’t using the device properly, then all the charges should be dismissed. It’s just as simple as that.
If it was me on my Chevy Bolt with a speed limit of 92mph I would be calling my attorney and getting that juicy check because #MERICA lol
If someone tries to give me a ticket in those damn European miles I will remind them that this was still America last time I checked.*
*If not in the USA I will tell them if it wasn’t for us they would all be speaking German. Or Japanese. Or Granadanian.
The story made me remember how my high school physics teacher used to scare his mom by telling her he went 88 on the highway bridge over the river. She would fret, and then he would say km/h (which is like 55 mph). Then, I shared this story with my physics class to show how the importance of using units correctly actually matters in real life.
*Marty* DOC! Were going fast enough but nothing’s happening! *Doc* Great Scott!
So the guy that was doing 144 mph said he wanted to have a little bit of fun. He didn’t say “what the hell are you talking about?” If I was going 90 miles an hour and got ticketed for 144, I would have some things to say.
Great point. Something like this happened to me years ago when a cop said I was doing 75 in a 35. In an 85 Corolla that probably had 70hp when it was new, let alone at 25 years old when I was driving it. That thing could probably get to 70 if you had a 5 mile long downhill on a highway. Maybe.
Of course when talking to the cops I try to minimize the bullshit they are about to throw my way, but they’re cops so they’re always right and really don’t listen to anything anyone ever says to them. Because they’re mostly jerks but also because they hear a lot of bs all day.
Similar thing happened to me while driving an 1980ish Dodge Omni and smashed into an suv of some sort crossing in front of me after a long uphill and very short downhill. Cop suggested I was speeding, I told him it’s a fucking Dodge Omni. Speeding is something it’s not capable of.
That’s why when they ask if you know why they pulled you over and you plan on fighting the ticket, you SHUT UP and reply, “No officer, I’m not sure.”
Exactly.
Right, setting this on the old back burner so I know where it is if it ever comes up. It may never, I’m always in massive traffic with no chance to speed.
Agreed. When they told him 144 he probably owned up to it. Case closed.
One time I was asked that question. I got pulled over doing probably 60 in a 35. I looked at the officer and said, “Well, I was speeding.” He burst out laughing, said at least I was honest about it, made sure I didn’t have any warrants and told me to slow down until I got on the highway.
I’ve had similar experiences twice. Both time the same highway. 80 on a 65 limit and 85 on a 65 limit. They both asked why I was driving so fast. Both times I admitted it was because there was virtually no traffic in areas where it was normally bumper to bumper shit show. Got a warning both times.
I should note that when it happened to me, I was in an industrial area and it was after 10pm on a Friday or Saturday night so the roads were wide and empty and I was heading for the highway on-ramp. And I think the officer was looking for DUIs and I hadn’t been drinking.
Well, at least he was paying attention to the road, and not the speedometer.
You’re also believing a quote from a LEA who just proved in a photo that their narrative may not be accurate.
Very true.
They don’t say in what order it was said.
Cop: What the hell are you boy? Some kinda doomsday machine?
BMW: Just having a little fun officer.
Cop: I got you doing 144.
BMW: No #&^€♤¤’ way!
Cop: Get out of the car, rocket man…
JW Pepper FTW!
“Secret agent?!? On whose siiiide?!?”
In court for my very first ticket, the officer was a bit over-wrought and testified that I was doing 90mph.
I pointed out that a) he claimed I did that around a 90° corner in b) a 1974 Super Beetle.
Case dismissed