Citation for stopping to "take pictures"

[Brian Ellis]

I can't help but wonder,
possible scenario?

Cop stops photog,
photog gets lippy,
Cop invokes rarely used article allowing a demand for instant payment due to potential high flight risk.

Possible?

If there is such an article then it's possible. Do you know of such an article? Maybe there is one but if so I haven't run across it in the brief amount of time I spent looking at Wisconsin's procedures for collecting traffic fines.

[evan clarke]

Yes it was illegal to stop. But just because a law is on the books does not mean you should expect it be enforced. Oral sex is still illegal in several states. Its illegal to have sex with a virgin in Washington D.C. My favourite is Alabama where its illegal to wear a fake moustache that makes people laugh in church.

In Wisconsin its illegal to:

Kiss on a train.

Cut a woman's hair.

Wear red in public if you are a woman.

Should I reasonably expect these laws to be enforced?


Like I said I've been doing this for a LONG time and never been fined. I've never even been asked to move along. I've had some cops intrigued by my camera and ask what I'm up to. When I say "taking pictures" they say "have fun".
A comparable example is that it is illegal to pass on the right or use the left lane for non-passing purposes on all US interstates, yet in my entire life I've only heard of one citation for it. (Though I understand they take it more seriously in Europe.)

It was pointed out that re-entering the interstate is the dangerous part, but like I said, this was far from busy. There were several gaps between vehicles of 10 minutes or more while I was waiting for the trooper to pull up/ write the citation. I would not do this in a place that I felt it would endager me or anyone else.

Forgot to add that, yes, he would accept cash, but no, I paid with credit card to the court district in which I was cited.

Yep, and it's illegal in Wisconsin to exceed the speed limit, EVERYBODY except me travelling on I94 in Milwaukee is going a minimum of 10-15 over but there are no speed traps. We have people doing 60 in a 30 routinely and there seem to be no tickets fot that either. Wisconsin law enforcement has no effect on anything here but they can prey on one easy sucker occasionally. They could balance the Wisconsin budget in one week on I94. You just got picked on...Evan Clarke

[evan clarke]

Originally Posted by Kirk Gittings
In every state, to gain more revenue, the interstate police (State Police in our state) are enforcing laws they never bothered to before to raise additional revenue.

Originally Posted by Allen in Montreal
Very true,
in Montreal they are ticketing for tires that touch the curb and have put measuring tapes in squad cars to check the distance to fire hydrants and corners.
Motorists are seen as cash cows, nothing more.




Disgusting?

I understand this is a public forum and you want to maintain a certain level of manners and that is polite of you :-), so I will agree on disgusting (but I would say much worse or that to the 100th power!)
Tourists are welcomed with open arms while paying their hotel room, eating in a nice resto, shopping along the boulevard, riding a Bixi public bicycle, but get in your car are you are easy meat!
The signs are very poor here, you are an easy target for the traffic cops.
Our mayor hates cars! Park it and walk or they will ticket you for something, anything!

As Kirk says, these hard times mean digging up every possible ticket revenue generating thing and hammer away at the people.

That said, stopping on the inter state was asking for it.
You would be ticketed for that here too, but you would never be asked to pay cash on the spot.

And on top of all that, Milwaukee area spent $900 million to build an abortion /baseball stadium under the guise of tourism while the public schools are going broke. Wake up everybody, we need to remove EVERYBODY in government and public employment...every last man and woman, no rotten apples left...Evan Clarke

[evan clarke]

I didn't know we could pick and choose which laws we wanted to obey. I learn something new every day on this forum.

Look around you everybody is picking and choosing which laws they want to break. You can't breathe without breaking a law ...EC

[rdenney]

How can 52 states have 52 different laws for road use, or am I miss reading this, In Australia we have the same rules in each, all though some have slight variations, and if an out of state motorist breaks the rule, he is advised of it and cautioned, this excluded interstate truck drivers who must know the road rules in each state, but one certain rule is the police cannot ask a driver to pay a fine on the spot, that is deemed corruption, surley that would apply in the U.S.A as well.

David

52 states? Did I not get the memo?

The states are more independent than are provinces in 'Stralia. It's built into our national psyche. We have no national police, and really like it that way.

Most states' traffic laws derive quite directly from the Uniform Vehicle Code, and they are all required to comply with the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. They succeed with those uniformity intentions with varying success, but generally speaking people drive coast to coast and do not see markedly different traffic control or enforcement practices.

But it's not just states that differ in their enforcement practices, but each enforcement jurisdiction. Some states limit enforcement jurisdiction on Interstate highways to the state police, but other states allow all agencies, including county sheriffs and city police, to provide enforcement within their boundaries.

And, Evan, if you think everyone in government should be fired right now, then be prepared to discover the legitimates roles of government even in the Constitution. Sometimes, government is conspicuous by its absence. For example, those who build roads, handle our waste, and clean our drinking water are government employees, and I don't know even the most ardent conservatives who don't include those basic services under the General Welfare clause. The problem is that often basic services are set aside in favor of luxuries we cannot afford, but eliminating government won't solve that problem. Anarchy is not the answer.

Rick "a government employee who believes in limited government" Denney

[evan clarke]

52 states? Did I not get the memo?

The states are more independent than are provinces in 'Stralia. It's built into our national psyche. We have no national police, and really like it that way.

Most states' traffic laws derive quite directly from the Uniform Vehicle Code, and they are all required to comply with the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices. They succeed with those uniformity intentions with varying success, but generally speaking people drive coast to coast and do not see markedly different traffic control or enforcement practices.

But it's not just states that differ in their enforcement practices, but each enforcement jurisdiction. Some states limit enforcement jurisdiction on Interstate highways to the state police, but other states allow all agencies, including county sheriffs and city police, to provide enforcement within their boundaries.

And, Evan, if you think everyone in government should be fired right now, then be prepared to discover the legitimates roles of government even in the Constitution. Sometimes, government is conspicuous by its absence. For example, those who build roads, handle our waste, and clean our drinking water are government employees, and I don't know even the most ardent conservatives who don't include those basic services under the General Welfare clause. The problem is that often basic services are set aside in favor of luxuries we cannot afford, but eliminating government won't solve that problem. Anarchy is not the answer.

Rick "a government employee who believes in limited government" Denney

The people who build the roads here in Wisconsin are contractors, not government employees. With the recent news that the stadium is going to require 2 to 3 more years to pay off it's interesting that the streets and roads in Milwaukee county which are maintained by government employees are a shambles. Most waste removal is done by private contractors. I'm not promoting anarchy, just replacement of them all with untouched, new people....EC

[rdenney]

The people who build the roads here in Wisconsin are contractors, not government employees. With the recent news that the stadium is going to require 2 to 3 more years to pay off it's interesting that the streets and roads in Milwaukee county which are maintained by government employees are a shambles. Most waste removal is done by private contractors. I'm not promoting anarchy, just replacement of them all with untouched, new people....EC

Do you think that private contractors are not also subject to the human condition? Do you think they are a different species than those who work for government, or that they went to different schools and learned different things? I spent two years in academic research, five years in state government, seven years in local government, 17 (successful) years in the private sector, and now I'm back in government at the federal level. I'm not speaking theoretically.

Where are you going to get these untouched, new people? Do you think an engineer who knows how to build a road sprouts out of the ground fully formed, complete with experience? I bet that if you actually spent time with the people about whom you complain, you might discover a wealth of capability that has be constrained externally, not that is incompetent internally. Every profession has its incompetents, but you are overstating the case by orders of magnitude.

Contractors build the roads, but they don't operate or maintain them. And they don't write the standards or specifications for how those roads are built, and they don't sit in front of public groups accepting abuse in discussions of where those roads will go. There is a lot more to roads than pouring concrete, and you have to decide at each stage who can do it most responsively to the will of the people. As I said, if you carry out your plan, you will discover two things: 1.) corruption lives at least as happily in the private sector as in the public sector, and 2.) the things you complain about being done poorly now may not be done at all, or may be done out of public view. For example, I think you'd find that most farmers would still be driving on dirt roads to bring their produce to market, for the same reason that most of them can't get decent high-speed Internet service (as an example of an entirely private infrastructure).

There is a law that I have observed over the decades. Government employees receive the blame for the dissatisfaction people feel about whatever, and so in bad times the size of government is reduced, often with little thought to what the proper roles of government should be. Then, when government grows in good times, new programs are added rather than improving old ones. When government shrinks, all programs are reduced across the board. This process contributes to reduced effectiveness over time. This is not the fault of government employees, who often have the least voice in these political decisions. It is an outgrowth of our system, which is the worst imaginable system (except for all the rest). The answer isn't to fire everyone and start over, but rather to reassess the role of government and set new priorities. That is necessarily a political process.

Private roads (and there are a few big ones, including one that I drive on regularly and pay dearly to do so) are indeed often well-run and well-maintained. But they often do not go where they need to go to build the most effective network, because the owners are interested in a given road's return on investment, not in the overall network. We actually have tried this experiment already for the first 140 years of U.S. history, and the people demanded more accountability for where and how roads were being built. That is what led to the creation of state highway bureaus, which are now state departments of transportation, often with the goal of providing more even service across the population. These were not created by those interested in big government, or during a time of rampant government growth. They were created because the people demanded public accountability and more equitable outcomes.

By the way, when I said removing waste, I wasn't talking about garbage collection. That is indeed a proprietary function. I was talking about sewage. I'm all ears for a plan on how to build an effective sewerage in any big city without public accountability. At the time of the founders, sewage was thrown in the street.

Rick "anarchy is not the answer" Denney

[Colleen K]

As a born and raised Chicagoian, my family used to always vacation in Wisconsin (of course Door County). We were always warned to be cautious of the Wisconsin State Police they were known to prey heavily on out of state plates (Illinois Residents in particular).


Blumine

That's funny because driving the interstates in Wisconsin, I very rarely pass a car with Illinois plates-it's always the other way around in that they fly by me about 10-20 mph faster, yet they always claim they are being picked on when stopped for speeding.
A friend of mine was stopped in a very well known speed trap several years ago and was given the option of paying the fine on the spot so it's not just out of state plates that get that treatment.
Colleen

[AFSmithphoto]

That's funny because driving the interstates in Wisconsin, I very rarely pass a car with Illinois plates-it's always the other way around in that they fly by me about 10-20 mph faster, yet they always claim they are being picked on when stopped for speeding.
A friend of mine was stopped in a very well known speed trap several years ago and was given the option of paying the fine on the spot so it's not just out of state plates that get that treatment.
Colleen

I wasn't given the OPTION of paying on the spot, I was threatened with jail if I didn't. And no I didn't "get lippy" that never helps the situation. According to the trooper it is standard practice for out of state plates in the magisterial district I happened to be in by decree of the judge. (That's right, THE judge, not the head judge, THE judge.) It is not a rare law he decided to invoke because he didn't like me or what I was doing, as it is printed in plain enlglish on the back of the citation.

So, to answer a couple of other questions that were asked: Not only do driving laws shift from state to state, within certain states they can shift from district to district as well. Also, its not a Wisconsin-wide law, which is why it is not in the driver's manual, however the fact that it exists in contradiction to the manaul may give me something to work with, so thanks for bringing that to my attention Brian.

[Toyon]

Definitely illegal, and if you check the casualty statistics you'll find that the side of an interstate is a very hazardous place to be. Cops hate to stop there, which may partially explain how pissed off he was.