The Fuzz was all over everything this morning. At Wawa, the Smokies were getting coffee, and there was more than one cruiser in the lot.
On the way to work, I drive through a small residential area, and there was a township cop parked on a corner waiting for speeders on a parallel road. I noticed him because there was a stop sign at that intersection.
As I pulled around the corner farther up and onto the parallel road (but heading away from the cop), a couple of cars were headed the other direction. They weren’t really going fast, but you never know what is going to trigger the local cops to stop you. I flashed my lights at them in warning.
I heard a story, but I can’t remember from whom, about someone who had passed a cop car on a country road travelling at the lawful speed limit. He flashed his lights at an oncoming car, who certainly would not have seen the cop hiding behind some bushes. Apparently, the cop saw him flashing his lights, and tore out behind him, sirens wailing. He was cited for obstruction of justice, or some crazy thing.
Of course the defense that got him off was your basic first amendment defense, and that makes sense. Basically, you have a freedom of speech, and that also includes a freedom to blink your headlights in communication at whomever you like, whenever you please.
I suppose that if you were causing a dangerous situation, say by flashing your lights at someone on the highway to the point of annoyance, that wouldn’t be protected speech, since it would be similar to yelling “fire” in a theater. But in the case of warning oncoming traffic to the presence of police, that was perfectly acceptible.
And really, isn’t the idea of having the police there - and really the idea of issuing citations in general - to get people to slow down before someone gets hurt? Maybe if average drivers flashed their lights at folks who were generally going irresponsibly fast we citizens could make our own dent (to use a poor word) in the incident rate of accidents.
