Ticket Article: Follow-Up

On Monday, I wrote about a letter to the editor in Sunday's Gainesville Sun in which a local high school student decried a police stakeout at the exit to his school's student parking lot where they issued several $104 citations to students for seat belt violations. In the letter, the student opined that if this were a campaign on the part of the police to educate teenagers on the necessity to buckle up, then why couldn't they simply have given warnings? After all, isn't that why there is a "warning" option anyway? Instead, those ticketed are faced with higher insurance costs because of this, unless they elect to spend more money for the traffic safety class option. By Tuesday, the newspaper devoted its entire editorial letter page to responses to this young man's letter. And I was initially shocked at their general tone, but ultimately not surprised.

Except for one letter, all of them criticized the ticketed student and praised the police. I don't know the ages of the writers, but they seemed to be coming from more elderly people who were intent on putting down teenagers. And then it hit me: these folks weren't objecting to the writer's driving behavior. They objected to him expressing his independent opinion openly in society.

I say this because of the harsh tone of many of the letters. The student was, to them, a child to whom life was one big series of lessons that benevolent adults had the unrestricted privilege of dishing out to them whenever THEY felt the urge. And speaking out against this was, to these respondents, an act of insolence, if not rebellion.

I want everyone, not just adolescents, to buckle up. And for everyone, not just adolescents, to be held accountable for following traffic laws, not just this one. Which is the whole point: if high school students are going to be ticketed like adults regarding their driving, then they should also have the recourse to protest their treatment in the media as well. None of the negative letters answered the question of why warnings weren't issued instead of tickets; neither did they have an adequate answer to the objection of the police camped out outside the school with their ticket pads and agenda already preset. Unless the "answer" was that teenagers need to be kept in their place, so anything to that effect goes!

I have a mixed record on this blog regarding the police. True, they are important protectors of the public. The officer who risked his life toward that purpose here in Gainesville last week is a great, heroic example. They are a glue holding our society together, keeping it from deteriorating into gang/militia zones (just look at the deplorable civil strife in some other countries). And they need to enforce traffic laws as well. Being a driver, I see more and more fellow drivers running red lights, driving severely distracted, and engaging in similar reckless behavior, threatening both me and other drivers and their passengers. Police need to watch out for these transgressors and deal with them appropriately.

But this profiling, this staking out, this hiding to catch people for violations: do we really need that much of it? Why do some police seem to be so insecure with their authority that they are so quick to resort to Taser stun guns and even firearms to subdue suspects? And why do they seem to get a free ride in the courts, with their testimonies rarely being challenged?

Perhaps the answers to these questions lie with the attitudes of a large segment of our population, which seems to hold that anyone in uniform has de facto social superiority and authority, and to question that authority is unsocial behavior. Especially if you're a teenager. At least Tuesday's editorial letters seem to indicate that.

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I don't plan to belabor this topic, but in today's Gainesville Sun editorial section, several letters were published that were in favor of the ticketed student, including another letter by the student himself. Making me wonder (but not too much) whether the newspaper itself was manipulating how the comments were published in order to create a scenario for keeping it going for several days as an ongoing topic (Note: while this has been going on, letters to the editor about the diversity of the programming of Gainesville's Public Radio station have "mysteriously" dropped off.)