| Road-rage bill would drive motorists mad
by Howie Carr, Harold Columnist, Sunday, March 25, 2001 |
Do you really want to give the cops more excuses to stop you while you're driving your car?
The Registry of Motor Vehicles says that last year 1,026,821 moving violations were written up in the commonwealth, but surely there were more, many more than that.
Only 348,250 speeding tickets were issued? The Plympton P.D. and Troop E of the state police must have written a half-million all by themselves.
So this week at the State House, the Legislature had its annual hearing on bills to further regulate driving. Regulate is an antiseptic word, but the more precise verb for these bills would be ``harvesting.'' The cops and insurance companies want to harvest motorists the way deer hunters harvest their prey every November.
You already know about that perennial bugaboo, the seat-belt law. Sooner or later the cops and the insurance companies will prevail - no way are they going to leave all those millions on the table. The cops will be able to pull you over solely for not wearing the belt. But it's not about the money, as they always say. It's for the children, wink wink nudge nudge.
Now let's consider another insidious piece of legislation, H. 1264 which, as the AAA puts it, ``will create a statute targeted at aggressive drivers.''
I call it the road-rage RICO bill. Like its big-brother (in more ways than one) federal counterpart, this bill bundles a bunch of violations together to impose ever harsher penalties, in this case a fine of up to $500 on a first offense. It's not about the money, remember.
Here are the bill's six predicate acts, as the feds would say:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all of the above already against the law? For example, failure to give signal - it was written up 7,238 times last year. We already have statutes that cover a whole range of anti-social behavior on the highway. They're called driving to endanger (7,262 tickets last year) and operating recklessly (another 933).
To put the extra collar on you, the cops have to observe at least three of the six crimes. Which means that when you appeal the citation and the cop has to testify in front of the magistrate, he will recite what you did in precisely the legal definition of your crime.
I called up the sponsor of this legislation, Rep. Vinnie Ciampa of Somerville, who is not a bad guy but has way too much time on his hands.
Vinnie muttered something about ``closure'' and how the road-ragers might benefit from the driver re-education classes required for repeat offenders. Now that's funny. They'll learn about as much in those re-ed classes as the cops themselves do in the criminology-cum-strippers courses they run for each another to jack up their paychecks with ``degrees'' from third-rate diploma mills.
Of course there's a problem with obnoxious drivers. But is the solution to give the most obnoxious drivers out there, namely, the cops, another excuse to oppress the rest of us?
This road-rage RICO law would work the same way as the souped-up seatbelt law will. They'll go easy at first but, slowly, it will become a big-ticket item. You know how it goes.
To impress either the selectmen or the mayor, the top cop orders a ``crackdown.'' For safety reasons, you understand. For the children. Revenues skyrocket, and so does overtime. Everybody's happy, except those of us left behind to pay the bills.
Six years later, all the cops who ordered the crackdowns are gone, out on ``disability,'' living large in Lauderdale, and you'll still be here, worrying about not only your flooded basement but also your car insurance ``surcharge'' from the nice company out in Webster.
All because some state reps had too much time on their hands.
It's enough to give you road rage.
Carr's radio show can be heard every weekday afternoon on WRKO AM 680, WHYN AM 560, WGAN AM 560 and online at www.howiecarr.org.
(Howie Carr is a columnist for The Boston Herald.)
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