Sorry abut the lack of updates lately folks. I’ve been plagued with allergies that would kill an adult yak, Fallout 3, and housesitting for a week.
Alright, so last night I headed up to Scottsdale to visit some friends and one of them was having a birthday. I got to the Mondrian around 10:30 PM, had 2 drinks there, and was at the W Hotel to meet up with some friends. I had one drink there. I left at around 1:15 to go home, because I work on Sunday mornings. When getting on the freeway, I saw a motorcycle cop parked to the side. I went with traffic and wasn’t too worried because I only had 3 drinks in 3 hours. However the cop got into the left lane, I saw out of my peripheral he was looking at me, and then he braked and got behind me and put on the lights.
Fucking great.
I open my glove compartment, grab my registration, get out my license and wait. The cop asks if he knows why I pulled him over; apparently I have no taillights. Brake/signal lights are working, but no tail lights. Oh, also, my entire dash display lighting went out too, so I’m guessing its a fuse issue I have to fix. Regardless, I apologized and told him I just bought the car about 2 weeks ago used, so I didn’t know they were out. Cop repeats this to me “Oh, you just bought it?” and then asked for my license, registration, and proof of insurance. Seeing as how I just the car, I don’t have insurance yet bc I want to do 6 months up front and I was going to do it on payday this week.
“I don’t have my insurance card with me, its at home”
“But you do have insurance?”
“Yes sir.”
“Okay. Where are you coming from?”
“Scottsdale, friends birthday”
“You had anything to drink tonight?”
“No sir”
“Not even a couple?”
“No sir, I knew i’d be driving home early.”
(I learned a long time ago that if a cop EVER asks you if you’ve had anything to drink, you automatically default to “No”. If you say no everytime, at least you have a decent chance of them not breathalyzing you. Even if you only have one, Lie. If they breathalyze you and you are over .08, you’re going to jail anyways, so who cares if you lied to them about it. If you are under .08, theres always the chance they could still take you in, but its unlikely any charges would come of it. But you can guarantee if you say “yes sir, a couple drinks”, they are 100% going to breathalyze you. If you look at the psychological motive of this, it’s mostly that drunk people don’t reason all that well; they use themselves as a reference point. “What would I do if somebody told me they had a drink or two? Probably understand, and let them go”. Yeah you and me, but we aren’t cops. In most incriminating situations, the cop is COUNTING on you to appeal to his “nice” or “human” side. Thats how cops get a lot of their information they use in court; they trick you into giving them information by basically pretending they’re your friend or understanding. This is just a little lesson and i’m sure most of you know this already, but just explaining my lie.)
“Okay, well i’m just going to give you a warning then. You should probably finish the drive with your hazards on on the way home so drunk drivers can see you better, at a stoplight or whatnot. I’ll be right back with your license and registration.”
At this point i’m still kinda freaked because I’m not sure if the cops down here have any sort of software on their network that checks if a car has insurance on it or not, but I guess they didn’t, because he ended up bringing back my warning and wishing me a good night. I drove home…with my blinkers all the way home.
This morning when I got into my car, the registration was still sitting on my seat, and I took a look at it before I put it back in the glove compartment. Thats when I realized this was my motorcycle registration. I gave the cop the wrong registration for a motorcycle I sold 3 weeks ago, and he didn’t catch it. Sure enough I checked the warning he gave me and he put down 2003 Honda Rebel in the make/model section of the ticket! The funny thing is, I told him I JUST bought the car, and that registration date was February of this year! So even if he didn’t catch that it was the wrong registration, he also didn’t catch my lie (although it wasa a truth) of “just buying it”, because the vehicle on that registration was owned for almost a year!
So basically, I got pulled over at 1:30 AM on a Saturday on a major highway on Indian Reservation land with alcohol in my system, no car insurance, both taillights out, and gave the cop the wrong registration, and STILL somehow just got a warning!!! Crazy. I really don’t think that would have worked with a state or local cop.
tl;dr? - Native Americans are not good law enforcement officers.
