$words[rand()]

Sat­ur­day night I was dri­ving home from a friend’s house around 11 PM. I get off I-71 at SR18 like usual and then cut in to a neigh­bor­hood that leads me around to Smith Road so I can bypass all the stop­lights on 18. A few sec­onds later I see head­lights gain­ing on me rapidly which are clearly a Crown Vic­to­ria, and as I come to a stop and the car behind comes up to me, I can see the 800-GRAB-DUI plate up front indi­cat­ing it’s a police car. I turn on to Smith and the car con­tin­ues to fol­low me at a very close dis­tance down a fairly steep hill that I have to ride my brakes on to stay at 25 MPH. Obvi­ously no one ever does 25 MPH down that hill unless they have a cop rid­ing their ass wait­ing for them to speed. (by the way, if I was to have fol­lowed as closely behind that cop as he did behind me I’d have a ticket for tail­gat­ing. why does he get a free pass?)

At the bot­tom of the hill there’s a stop light, I con­tin­ued on straight and the offi­cer behind me turned off back towards route 18. About that time I get a call from a friend of mine who had seen the cop pull in behind me. Appar­ently he had flipped his lights on and cut across three lanes to fol­low me, so my friend thought I had been pulled over. I had made a bit of an aggres­sive turn in to the neigh­bor­hood and it was late on a Sat­ur­day night, so at the time I just fig­ured they were out on DUI patrol and had left once it was clear I wasn’t weav­ing (or even buzzed, I hadn’t drank a drop that day).

I keep going down Smith, then turn down 57 towards my apart­ment. As I pull away from a four-way stop, I see the same Med­ina PD unit that had been fol­low­ing me (I made note of the num­ber) pull up to the other side of the inter­sec­tion and then pull in behind me again. Approach­ing my street, I see a Med­ina Town­ship unit sit­ting in the street with his rear lights on. Com­ing around the cor­ner, there are three other units includ­ing Brunswick PD, Montville PD, and another Med­ina PD car in the park­ing lot of one of the other apart­ment build­ings on my street. The car that was once again fol­low­ing me pulled in behind the Town­ship unit in the street and fired up his lights as well. There is also a mid-90s Cadil­lac in the mid­dle of it all with some younger males stand­ing around it.

At this point I’m of course inter­ested. Rarely do you see five units on scene when noth­ing of inter­est has happened.

Today I fire up the Med­ina City PD Pub­lic Infor­ma­tion Log and pull up the infor­ma­tion for the weekend:

Incident #: 10-004590

Nature of Incident: Traffic Violation

Offense Reported: Traffic-Moving Violation

Time Reported: 23:20:10

Time Occurred Between: 23:20:10 02/20/10 - 23:20:10 02/20/10

Responsible Officer: Lynn S

Complainant:

Incident Address:
Springbrook; 300 Blk
Medina, OH 44256

Narrative:
No plate light

Five units from four agen­cies, two of which are out of their juris­dic­tion, for a license plate light? Really?