imported post
Ah yes, my daughter was stopped in a South Beloit, Illinois checkpoint a few years back and the trooper saw on the back of her driver's license that there was a restriction on how many people she could have in the car with her. The trooper did not notice, however, that the restriction had an automatic expiration date also, that the expiration date was long past, and did not want to listen to my daughter pointing those facts out. Nor did the state trooper verify whether the restrictions were valid. So the trooper had the car, which is registered to me, towed away, leaving my daughter and her friends stranded far from home in the middle of the night in that hell hole of a town. Needless to say, I was not pleased when I was awakened by my daughter's phonecall and had to drive to S. Beloit at 1:30 a.m. It was a good thing that the drive down took just barely enough time for me to cool off slightly or I would have ripped that trooper a new one on the spot. And I might have still done that, except the state trooper who screwed up had gone off duty prior to my arrival. The checkpoint was still in operation however with several county and state units. I asked the nearest county seargent who was in charge of this idiotic operaton and he pointed to a state trooper. He was sympathetic, but said there he was nothing he could do since it was the other trooper's call on my daughter's license. Well, I ended up waking up the guy who had towed the car, paid $150 to get the car released and we headed back to Wisconsin. Next day I made the simple verification (that the trooper neglected to do) that my daughter had no restrictions on her license. I contacted the IL state police office for that area, talked to a sergeant, then a lieutenant, then a captain. It didn't take long for them to figure out they had screwed up and understood why I was angry and ready to sue. They apologized and told me I'd have to make a claim with the state, but then decided they'd contact one of the state lawyers to try bypass that drawn-out process. A check was sent in short order.
So, that's my experience with these lovely checkpoints. An incompetent state trooper, instead of doing her job carefully, was willing to strand a carload of kids in the middle of a night, in a parking lot, in another city, in another state.
It is well known that police use such tactics as fishing expeditions. They don't give a crap that people have a light burnt out on their license plate, but they sure like to use such little things as an excuse to stop you and snoop around. With checkpoints they don't even need a flimsy excuse to stop you. It's just one small step closer to the creation of a police state in my opinion.
