Lottery

By lottery, I am not talking about where you pay some money to loose a statewide game, like the state lotto, I am talking about an event or an affair whose outcome is or seems to be determined by chance. I am sure your mind also went straight to law enforcement. This morning on my way to work I saw a police officer on a motorcycle hiding behind a tree on the on ramp I was using to enter the freeway. It was a scene straight out of the dukes of hazard, all except for there weren't two hicks jumping an orange dodge charger over the freeway blaring Dixie.

We, as a citizenry, pay the police to enforce the law. I don't know exactly when the first state government body decided that cars were going fast enough, and laid out speed limits to ensure a source of income, but I can remember there were speed limits as far back as the 1970s which is a long long long time. I am going to presume that speed limits are even older than that. In all that time the police have come up with some pretty high tech ways of enforcing the law. For instance, use a motorcycle to hide behind a tree in order to catch a single speeder out of a freeway full of speeders. I entered the freeway doing about 35 mph with a burning desire to be the Paul Revere of the situation and alert everyone to the hiding policeman. However, to avoid getting hit, I quickly brought it up to 65, but still got passed left and right, which made me wonder...Which speeder is that policeman after?

I never did find out. I was long gone by the time that officer made his move, if he even made his move. Nope, I didn't get a ticket. This isn't a bitter rage against the law enforcement machine. I realized I don't understand why we pay cops so well to do such a crappy job? Sure, they put themselves in harms way to keep me safe every single day. Know why? Because they are doing the same thing police have done since the first cop sat in a donut shop racially profiling people. Police should be back at headquarters building super awesome crime fighting machine 2000! Which is of course a robot drone that could hide behind a bush to catch a single speeder out of many. Maybe the robot could match drivers faces against a state database in real time so he could catch speeders that were also having a birthday that day, just to teach them a lesson.

I don't favor a police state where every move that anyone makes is monitored and any law that is broken is immediately punished. But doesn't it seem like, for the money we pay for a police force, they would have in turn come up with a really efficient way of getting mundane tasks completed? Why don't the police, or the federal government, set aside money for law enforcement R&D? And why do we still have pesky speed limits? No one likes getting speeding tickets, and everyone I know including me speeds. Then the money from our speeding tickets goes back into the pool of money that gets used to pay a cop to keep hiding behind a tree, catching whoever he or she decides is the worst offender at that particular moment.

I say we quit hiring police types. We have enough overly-testosteroned, controlling brutes with guns hiding behind trees and saying things like "I am hooking up the perp" or "7 mary 5, we are in hot pursuit of a cheech, code blue!". Our new force should be the scrawniest nerds this country has to offer, hot pocket eating docker wearing nerdly nerds. They will feel so picked on by our current brutish police force that they will have robot replacements snapping towels in locker rooms in a year, maybe less. I can't wait to try and talk a robot cop out of a speeding ticket.