Subject: 12 secrets the cops, courts, and insurance co's don't want you to know.

From: NMA <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Sep 1995 16:09:55 GMT

Twelve Secrets the Cops, the Courts, and the Insurance Companies Don't 
Want You to Know

The purpose of insurance is to cover unusual risk. Since the act of 
exceeding an unreasonably low limit is hardly unusual or dangerous, the 
risk assumed by the insurance company is nearly non-existant.  Therefore, 
any surcharges issued for speeding tickets are almost pure profit.

The profits that an insurance company generates from speeding ticket 
surcharges allow them to purchase more radar and laser guns to give away 
free to law enforcement agencies.  This allows the cops to ticket more 
people, which in turn ensures a constant flow of revenue to the insurance 
company.  The units will perform their revenue-enhancment duties for 3-5 
years, having been paid for in less than one.

Thousands of speeding tickets are issued by traffic law enforcers who 
don't know or care how to properly operate radar, VASCAR, or other 
speed-measurement devices.  They are ignorant of proper operating 
procedures, performance characteristics, and common malfunctions
or errors.

Traffic ticket fines are the cash cow of the court system.  No other 
class of "crime" is as profitable for state and local governments as is 
that of traffic tickets.  Traffic courts cannot be fair and unbiased when 
their finanacial welfare depends on traffic fines.

It is not true that writing more tickets will result in fewer accidents. 
A 1995 Memorial Day ticket-writing binge in Connecticut resulted in a 67% 
increase in accidents over the same time period in the previous year.  
The federal government paid $750,000 to the state for that.

Many speed limits are deliberately set well below the prevailing speed of 
safely-driven vehicles.  Doing so does not slow traffic but it does make 
a greater number of motorists eligible for a speeding ticket they don't 
deserve.

There is no connection between receiving an occasional traffic ticket and 
the likelihood of being in an accident.  Therefore, there is no 
justification for charging a person more for auto insurance just because 
they were convicted for a traffic violation.

Trivial or concocted traffic law violations are frequently used as an 
excuse to stop, detain, and search persons for whom the police have no 
otherwise legitimate reason to do so.   "Probable cause" or "reasonable 
suspicion" are inserted after the fact and only if the motorist lodges a
formal complaint.

A large proportion of the stop signs erected by local governments are 
illegal and in violation of state traffic regulations.  They know that 
people don't stop for them since the intention is to use the signs as a 
speed control device.  This proliferation of stop signs merely
increases the number of motorists who can be cited for failing to stop 
when there is no reason to.

The best protection against the "good ole boy" system where the judge, 
district attorney and the arresting officer are on a first-name basis is 
the jury trial.  Jury trials are time-consuming, expensive, and diminish 
the profitability of the traffic ticket system.  Therefore, 
state-by-state, the right to a jury trial is being incrementally denied 
to traffic ticket defendants, all under the guise of being more fair when 
actually it is less.

Only a small fraction, about 2 percent, of all traffic tickets are 
seriously contested.  The vast majority of these contested tickets are 
dismissed or the defendant is given a significantly reduced penalty.  

If just 10% of the people who received citations fought their tickets, 
the entire system of government extortion would collapse within a matter 
of months.

Join the NMA now.  Help return some fairness and reason to North American 
driving laws. All it takes is a phone call: 800-882-2785 or stop by our 
website.

-- 
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