Police Officers Using Citizens as Human Shields Out of Stupidity

The Merced Sun-Star ran a story today about a California Highway Patrol officer who escaped injury on Monday when a tractor-trailer sideswiped his patrol car while writing a speeding ticket. It is unfortunate that officers are injured while doing their job to keep our roads safe, but reading between the lines of the article it is clear that officers are trained to put their lives above those they are suppose to be protecting.

Officer Shane Ferriera, public affairs officer for the Merced Area Highway Patrol states that “one of the most dangerous jobs of being a patrolman is working close to traffic”. She goes on to say that officers are trained to hop over the other side of the guardrail when writing citations to be safe.

What she doesn’t say, which is very clear, is that by doing this the officer puts the citizen who was stopped, often for a very minor traffic infraction, in the line of danger. The citizen and their vehicle are used as a buffer to protect the officer from traffic. The officer meanwhile retreats to the relative safety that the guardrail provides.

Although I wasn’t able to find statistics, many citizens and law enforcement personal are killed or injured every year during traffic stops. In fact new police cars are coming equipped with special safety equipment to protect the occupants of the car should they get rear ended while parked along the road. The solution to this is so simple it is ridiculous that an action plan hasn’t been implemented to avoid these incidents.

Don’t stop people on the highway if there is not a very clear offset that they can pull into, putting them and the officer out of harms way. Use your loudspeaker to have the person you are pulling over to drive to the next exit and pull into a safe spot such as a parking lot.

Is it worth your life – or ours – to give a ticket for a traffic violation? I was taught when learning to drive that I should only pull over on the shoulder of the road for emergencies. Is collecting a few hundred bucks for a speeding ticket really an emergency? Use some common sense boys and girls; don’t play in traffic.