Who is the dumbest law enforcement officer you have ever encountered?
07.06.2025 14:00
Believe it or not it was a Virginia State Trooper and when I politely pointed it out, he got really, really mad - but not at me. It’s kind of a long story about a car accident I had and the police response. Once the Trooper realized that he was picturing things wrong, he understood that the other guy that just “explained” to him how the accident happened was lying through his teeth and that made the Trooper very angry. It was 1993 and I had a cell phone but smart phones were a long way away.
The Virginia State Trooper showed up about 4 or 5 minutes later and parked behind the pickup truck and facing my Corvette (and facing East like me with the pickup behind him facing West). He talked to the other guy for about 20 or 25 minutes. With the wind and the road noise I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, but they were obviously having a great time, laughing and cutting up, and the guy was talking with his hands motioning how this happened and how that happened, etc. etc. Not looking good for me I think.
I knew it was going to be a problem when he said, “Didn’t you see me?” like that was a meaningful statement. I said, “Yeah I saw you trying to pull a U turn in the middle of the beltway in rush hour traffic. Was I supposed to see something else?”, and he says, “Then why didn’t you miss me?” That was it for me. I told him I wasn’t going to talk to him anymore after that. I had called the cops and would wait for them. The driver who was behind me when I had the accident pulled over onto the shoulder, ran back to me and handed me his card. He said, “Keep this and call me. I cannot believe you are alive and I still don’t know how you avoided killing yourself but I want you to know that you are in shock, and you are not going to be totally coherent with the cop - but I have to go to work and can’t wait around so call me later. I will be a witness for you if you want me to be. I saw everything and it was all that guy’s fault.” I thanked him and pocketed the card. I took a disposable camera I happened to have in the glove box and snapped about 20 or so pictures of both vehicles from different angles that I hoped would prove my story was the correct one if I had any issues with my or his insurance company. It did. Those pictures are the only way I got his insurance to pay out for my car and I highly recommend you have a dash cam and take pictures with your phone of everything.
Then the Trooper asked me to come into his car. He asked me if I had been drinking and I said, “No, it’s 8:30 in the morning.” He said, well that guy told me you seemed drunk and I was smelling alcohol in the air as I walked by your car so I want to give you a breathalizer. You okay with that?” I said yeah and he gave me the breathalizer. It read zero so he said there must have been something wrong and he did it again. It read zero again and he just stared at it like he couldn’t believe it, when I said, “Okay, you want to hear the truth about how this accident happened now?” He said, “I already know what happened. I can see that you rear-ended him.” I about crapped and said, “Really, how’s that?”, and he said, “Okay, explain it to me then.”
The Trooper never apologized to me but he wrote the guy up for reckless driving and illegal lane change. So all’s well that ends well and I forgive the cop for being a dick, but not realizing that looking at things in a mirror is the reverse of what they are in real life is pretty stupid. What’s even more stupid is believing a lying POS with 2 DUIs on record and a history of moving violations over a guy with none, but cops always love screwing over Corvette owners. BTW - since he lied to insurance company about the accident and they tried to not pay me for the car he totalled, I took a half day off and went to court and testified against him so the charges wouldn’t get dismissed (because the cop didn’t show up) so he was convicted of reckless driving, was fined, and had his license suspended. And I took all those pictures I took at the scene and sent them to his insurance company after they told me they weren’t going to pay me. They called me back a few hours later and agreed to pay what I asked.
I told him about the guy making a U turn that I thought was an attempt to take an exit, and that I hit him broadside as he was illegally crossing 5 lanes of rush hour traffic. He said, “Then why did you hit his bumper?” and I said, “Because I couldn’t turn fast enough to miss his truck entirely.” So I hit the left side of his bumper from the side, I hit the driver’s side of his bumper and bent it BACKWARDS. If I had rear ended him I would have hit the right side of his bumper, the passenger side of the bumper and I would have bent it FORWARD. That’s when things got funny ha ha ha. He said, “You’re a liar, I can see his bumper is damaged on the right side.” I said, “OFFICER, YOU ARE LOOKING AT HIS TRUCK IN A MIRROR. EVERYTHING IN A MIRROR IS REVERSED. TURN AROUND AND LOOK AT HIS TRUCK THROUGH YOUR BACK WINDOW.” He did that and then he just stared at that truck. Then he looked at me and looked back at the truck. Then he looked at me again and said, “I wondered how that bumper got bent the wrong way.” And I said, “That’s WTF I’ve been trying to tell you. That guy was blowing smoke up your ass because he was guilty of about 5 different moving violations and caused the accident.”
I was in the left lane on a 10 lane divided highway. The divider between the Eastbound lanes and the Westbound lanes was a shoulder and a concrete jersey wall and a shoulder on the other side of the concrete jersey wall and every few miles it would open up enough to let emergency vehicles make a U turn from the 5 lanes heading East to the 5 lanes heading West or vice versa. So it’s 8:30 AM and I’m doing 65 in my lane when a pickup truck in the left lane a few hundred yards ahead of me slants right toward the right lanes, I thought it was because he wanted to take the exit coming up quick and he had forgotten to get over to the right, but I was wrong. What he was doing was making a big mistake by slanting right and then turning broadside to oncoming traffic so he could shoot through the opening in the jersey wall because he wanted to make an illegal U turn on a 10 lane interstate in rush hour traffic. The problem is he slowed down to about 10 or 15 MPH as he turned back left and was broadside to me when I realized I was going to T-bone the truck. At first I slammed on my brakes enough to shoot up a bunch black smoke but when it was clear I couldn’t stop in time I let off the brakes and turned right as hard as I could without going into a spin. I ended up hitting the driver’s side step bumper of his truck with my left front headlight at about 40 MPH and my ’84 Corvette lifted up the back of his pickup truck and threw it up and away from me. So I lost the front left everything in front of my car, the windshield strut broke but held and my windshield was all over the inside of the car. I got a few cuts on my face and wrists, but nothing that needed a doctor. I pulled onto the left shoulder a couple hundred yards up the road and backed up to be a little bit behind the pickup truck, which was also on the shoulder and facing in the wrong direction (since I picked his rear end up and threw it out of my way). The red line shows what he was trying to do, and the black lines I put on the photo to show the break in the jersey wall (it’s not there any more but that’s pretty much exactly what it looked like that morning. I was about 150 yards behind him when he started towards the exit and slowed down to make the fishhook turn towards the jersey wall.