Getting pulled over by police is something that almost certainly happens to most drivers at least once in their lives. Sometimes, you have a dead brake light and don’t realize it. Or, perhaps you’re testing a brand new Chevy Camaro in Virginia and go just a bit too fast. Whatever the reason, traffic stops happen. What’s the dumbest reason you’ve gotten pulled over?
I’m somewhat surprised to say that despite my love for reaching the far end of tachometers, my driving record is largely clean. I like to keep my thrill-seeking vehicular shenanigans away from where others could get hurt, and I suppose that also keeps me out of the spotlight of the law.
Still, I’ve goofed up a couple of times. The weirdest time I got stopped happened to be when I was customizing a 1986 Honda Elite 150D for the Gambler 500. Oh yes, I took the pop-up headlight wonder off-road! I got the scooter for a few hundred bucks because it had a bent frame, no title, and rough panels. It was far enough past its prime that I didn’t feel guilty about beating it up.
I quickly discovered a critical issue with the scooter and it was the fact that it didn’t have a working cooling fan. I fixed that with an oversized fan from a bigger scooter. Then, I added off-road light pods to complete the Mad Max theme I was going for. I left the wiring exposed for that rough look seen in that movie series’ universe. One more repair was to the scooter’s ignition, which jammed and broke the key. One quick detour to eBay later and I was back on the road!
When I was finished ruining this poor scooter, I took it on a test ride. As I said before, the scooter didn’t have a title. The ol’ Vermont trick was still a thing back then, so that’s what I did. But I didn’t want to wait for the plate to come in to take it for a test ride. Instead, I slapped the plate from a Suzuki GS on the back and hopped on. I figured I was just going around the block, so it would have been fine.
It wasn’t. Halfway through the short ride, I got pulled over. Now, I initially thought I got pulled over either because of the license plate or the janky modifications. It was neither. The officer said he pulled me over because I didn’t put my foot down at a stop sign. I knew that in Illinois, stopping a motorcycle technically doesn’t count until your foot is down, but I didn’t think anyone would enforce it. Stopped is stopped, right?
Well, this officer did try to enforce it, but he was amused by my little science project. He found nothing overtly illegal, but he did notice the plate belonged to a Suzuki rather than the Honda. Making matters worse, he stopped me in a dead zone, so my insurance app wasn’t working. The officer explained that a wrong plate, no provable insurance, and no ownership documents were more than enough grounds to send my crappy scoot to the impound.
I explained myself and the officer was nice about everything. I got a warning and my instructions were to head home immediately and that the scooter better not show up again with the wrong plate. No problem! I learned a few valuable lessons that night. The officer informed me that at least in this state, it’s better to run no plates than plates from the wrong vehicle. It also helps to keep a local digital copy of your insurance plus a physical copy.
In second place was the time I was stopped for speeding in one of my Smarts. It perhaps should have been more than just a ticket, but the cop couldn’t stop laughing at witnessing a Smart going so fast. The laugh was apparently good enough to let me off with a warning.
So, those are the dumbest stops I’ve ever had. What about you?
Topshot: framestock/stock.adobe.com
So many to choose from. For this round I’ll go with the trip to see Bush (the band, what were you thinking?) during my college years driving a jacked-up ’81 Mercury Cougar with an ’87 Mustang engine in it, four bolt factory-wheels swapped/rebuilt to fit five-bolt American Racing D-spokes, and a pair of those loud, cheap, “turbo” mufflers on it. It was my “cool” car – a gentleman’s hot rod of sorts.
I was still working at a body shop during long weekends and summers and my boss’s wife asked if I could take their daughter, 14, to the college I was attending and show her around the campus, culminating in taking her to the Bush concert she had been begging to see. They’d pay for everything – meals, gas, etc. What they really wanted was for her to witness something past high school and maybe, just maybe, engage in a bit of early wild-child course-correction.
Anyway, it was about a two hour drive and we stopped for a soda before getting on the interstate portion of the trip. She forgets to put her seatbelt on and I don’t notice. A little ways later a highway patrol car starts going around us, then drops back and pulls us over. Walks up to the car looking normal-level highway patrol pissed. Things escalated quickly.
Part of me can see why – I’m 21 wearing a Metallica T-shirt with shoulder-length hair and there’s a pack of Camel Wide-lights on the dash (a little crazy to think I was the one her parents picked as a “role-model”). She’s 14, dressed in a concert T-shirt of some sort and the requisite ripped jeans of the time. The rear license plate was scraped all to hell and propped up in the back window with an old distributor-cap keeping it wedged in place as it had been torn off backing out of steep, odd-angled driveway while delivering pizzas a week before.
Officer wants to see the usual. Here’s my license, insurance, regis…. opps no registration. That’s right, several months earlier my parents had paid for my plates as a birthday present, but then only had the sticker on hand when I showed up at the house. “It’s fine – that’s all you need” my mom had said when I asked where the registration paper was to go with it. This was sure to be fun.
Girl gets to go be interrogated in patrol car first. She was there for quite awhile – said the officer was nice, but she had to answer a lot of questions and still ended up with a seat-belt ticket. I get to be next. He starts reading me the riot act about proper license plate placement, passenger seat belt use, having a loud muffler, and Fraudulent Use Of Registration. When I try to explain the plates situation, he starts yelling to the point of spittle getting on the dash “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR YOUR BULLSHIT” and proceeds to get out a voice recorder. That gets turned on, I explain the long-winded story of why I had a sticker, but no registration and then asked if there was a way to find out what car the sticker belonged to since I didn’t know (and he kept asking me).
Turns out there was – he calls in a number on the sticker on my car. Comes back registered to a 1968 Cadillac in my name. Apparently my mom had sent the wrong registration back in. He seemed confused at this point, but apparently satisfied enough so then it was on to the girl. I think I answered roughly 40 questions, starting with her name which he made me spell both first and last. Then about my story in general, about the body shop, how I started working there, how I knew the family, he wanted to see the concert tickets, my student ID… it Just Kept Going.
Finally, he let us go, but kept both plates from the car and said I was to park the car immediately after reaching our destination and not drive it until I had properly renewed my registration and gotten new plates (uh yeah, I’m sure my boss wants his daughter spending an entire weekend in a guys’ college dorm).
When we reached the college town a half hour later I was immediately pulled over for not having plates. I told the cop the story and showed him the ticket he had given me, whatever it was for. The cop looked at it, started laughing and said “I can’t believe he let you go without the plates! I had some officer training with this guy – he was a real dick!”
Thankfully, that cop let us go. Since we had spent the afternoon on the side of the road with a highway patrol officer, the college-tour wasn’t happening and we just went to the concert. The two-hour drive back took over three as I stuck to gravel for almost the entire way. Stayed over at my parents and borrowed one of their cars to get back to college and get my plates sorted. What an exhausting weekend.
Remember to put on your dumb seatbelts, kids!
I have to add this one because I proactively tried to keep the Mass. State Police officer from getting in trouble.
I’m riding work, heading into Boston on the old “lower deck” of I-93. Where the HOV lane split off from traffic into its own protected lane, a State Trooper was parked watching vehicles. He pulls me over on my motorcycle, which are allowed under Federal statute to travel in the HOV lane. I even kept the U.S. Code under my seat, copied right out of the law books.
I ask him what’s up and he starts with “sign says 2 people for HOV and you are one”. I tell him that the Federal law allows me to travel even with 1 occupant. I volunteer to show him the law, but he declines and is starting to act pissed. I suggest that instead of me going to the hearing and getting him in trouble, he should call back to the barracks and check. I’ve had this conversation with other state troopers that were more reasonable, but I’m getting nowhere with this guy, so I just ask him to give me the ticket.
I go back to work and since I worked in a law firm, I get the librarians to help me pull relevant legal sources to take to court. I’m PREPARED and schedule my hearing with the clerk magistrate in Charlestown District Court.
I get there on the appointed day and have my exhibits all ready to go. The magistrate calls my case and I go up front. He asks me to recite my side of the story after he read the charge: “single person occupancy in the HOV lane”.
I start with “Your honor, I was riding my motorcycle to work when the trooper pulled me over and wouldn’t listen to my assertions that I was legal to ride in the HOV lane”.
I’m ready to go on, but the magistrate interrupts me.
“Mr. Outwest, do I understand that you were riding your motorcycle?”
“That’s true, your honor.”
Now the clerk magistrate has smoke coming out of his ears. He turns to the State Trooper sitting there acting as a representative for the cops and he’s fuming mad.
“Lieutenant, haven’t I instructed you multiple times before to stop wasting the time of people like Mr. Outwest who are lawfully riding their motorcycle to work? How many times do I have to have this conversation with you? You’re wasting this gentleman’s time and most egregiously, you’re wasting the time of THIS COURT!”
He turns back to me. “Mr. Outwest, the court would like to apologize to you on behalf of the Massachusetts State Police for wasting your time and any expenses you’ve incurred. I will be having a conversation with the lieutenant here about the quality of his troopers’ understanding of the law.”
Well, that worked out pretty well.
Next day, I’m riding to work as usual and the same trooper is standing there by his car, pulling out single drivers in the HOV lane. I give him a cheery wave. He turns and looks the other way. He was there every day for a couple weeks and I waved to him every single day.
In Universtity, I was a Residence Advisor and the all female floor taped femine hygeine products all over the back bumper on my birthday. Officer pulled me over because the tampons hanging down where obscuring my licence plate. He also thought that some one might be laighing so hard that it would be only a matter of time before I was rear ended.
> all female floor
> In Universtity
That is the best typo.
I was going around a tight bend in the road with my high beams on. When another car entered the turn headed the opposite direction, I moved to flip the high beams off and accidentally turned the headlights off completely. I immediately turned them back on, of course.
That car turned out to be a police car. He wheeled around, turned on his red and blues, and I pulled over. He ordered me out of my car and stashed me in the back of his. I was 16 and scared shitless, no idea what I had done wrong. After grilling me with a bunch of totally unrelated questions, he eventually he explained that he pulled me over because I “flashed my lights at him”. When I told him what really happened, he again scolded me for doing such a horrible thing.
Had I not been a scared, dipshit kid at the time, I would have been furious. Instead I sheepishly got back in may car and went on my way.
Another time, like Mercedes, I had my motorcycle impounded for having a plate on it that didn’t belong to that bike. That was me being stupid, so I guess it counts, too.
I got pulled over once because the LED marker lights on the front of my car were slightly the wrong shade of amber, this was after like 5 years of driving and having this car inspected yearly.
Does Torch know about this? Surely some of his taillight bar associates could help out with such issues.
Jason, your thoughts, please?
My first time ever getting pulled over was for stopping correctly at a stop sign.
I was turning on to a two lane country road from a small side street with a stop sign and the painted mark on the ground quite far back. The truck in front of me kept creeping forward looking for a break in traffic, so when he finally took off, I was already up to the line. I looked both ways, had a decent break, so I took off as well, right in front of a cop that immediately pulled me over.
At first he told me he pulled me over for not stopping at the stop sign and I responded that I came to a complete stop. He then stated I ran the stop sign for not pulling forward and coming to a complete stop at the sign. I pointed out that I was at the sign and the painted stop mark, and that if I had done what he requested, I would have been stopping in an intersection which is illegal. He went back to his car for a while and then tried to save face by saying he was letting me off with a warning “this time”, but we both knew he was full of it.
No lie, I once got pulled over because my license plate was “too dirty.” I had a first gen Acura RSX with a massive oil leak so the entire back side of my car would accumulate filth. The officer said that he couldn’t read my plate, and told me to go home and wipe it off.
I haven’t been pulled over very many times in the last few decades, but I once got pulled over in a 250,000 mile 3/4 ton work truck for miraculously (and impossibly) accelerating from 0-97mph in 45 feet while also turning perpendicularly. I was stopped at a red light in the left turn lane, and a cop was stopped at the same light in cross traffic. The light turned green, I started accelerating in my clapped out work truck, and the cop had its lights on before I made it through the intersection. I was maybe doing 20mph when the cop pulled me over, and then he started yelling at me for speeding. I asked how I could have gotten going 97mph on a left turn, and how he caught up to me less than 500′ from the intersection if I was going that fast, and the cop just got mad and still wrote me a ticket because “That’s what my radar gun said you were doing”. Fortunately, I was able to get the ticket dismissed, but it was still really dumb.
LOL. 0-97mph in 45ft is equivalent to 7.5g of acceleration, or 0-60mph in 0.4 sec.
Can any manmade vehicle (except artillery and rocketry) do that?
Apparently, a bone-stock, worn-out 1991 K2500 can!
Highway 301, especially Starke, Hampton, Waldo and Lawty, Florida. That’s all I’m saying.
Not sure if Starke, Hampton, Waldo, and Lawty are the inbred local cops or the towns they’re from.
We puled over on our own to assess whether to put chains on our car in the snowy conditions. We saw a sign earlier that would have required chains, but it didn’t. As we were sitting there off the road in a pullout preparing to install chains, we were “pulled over” by a cop. Meaning that the cop pulled next to us and told us we needed to have chains installed. We mentioned the sign that did NOT require chains and we met with shouted words of “I cleaned off that sign with my own bare hands!”. Gave us a ticket. Bull, we drove by there BEFORE you, not AFTER you cleaned it off (obviously didn’t say that outloud). Finished installing chains.
In high school I was an exchange student abroad during my Junior year. During my Senior year, back in Wisconsin, I was invited to all of the exchange student gatherings for those staying in Wisconsin from other countries. One night the activity was a sleepover at a high school. There was no supervision that I recall. Since I was the only one there with a car, I was recruited to go and get cigarettes and Mountain Dew. I took a girl from Japan with me who I’d been flirting with and proceeded to get on a short section of freeway to get to a gas station. Driving my mom’s Mazda V6 626, I decided to try and impress her with some speed. Unfortunately it was 2 am and a cop was on that section of road waiting for drunks and she pulled me over. She got me a 72 in a 55, I had been going faster, but after explaining that we were staying at the High School and just going to get Mountain Dew, she wrote me for a $15 seatbelt ticket (she knew I took it off to get my license). She said she was just happy that we weren’t drinking, we normally did drink at these get togethers, and asked me to slow down. We got the smokes and Dew and went back to the high school.
Several years later I ended up coaching soccer at the same high school.
Headlight not on in my ’71 Honda CB350. I always left the headlight switch on due to the law. The night before I had replaced the throttle cable and had turned the headlights off as part of the replacement process.
I was once pulled over (in Vermont coincidentally) for moving halfway over the centerline to pass a police officer with someone else pulled over. He immediately left them, flew up behind me, and accused me of driving drunk. I was in high school, on my way to band practice, and clearly not inebriated. After threatening further charges including reckless driving, he “let me off easy” with a $250 ticket for “Failure to keep to the right”.
Side note, it is legal in VT to pass on a double yellow.
Resolution: he did not show up to the court date and the ticket was thrown out. Waste of everyone’s time.
I’ve probably deserved most or all of them (feelings about tinted windows or front plates aside) but here’s probably the two worst:
The cop that cited me for “excessive acceleration” when I downshifted my bike through a left turn is tied for the cop that pulled my wife over for having too many helium balloons in her car – “obstruction of view” because she couldn’t see out the back window. She gave him a balloon and he let her off. Both were the same PD, but years apart.
I fought the excessive acceleration in court and turned a $40 ticket into $41 in court costs and half a days lost pay. Still worth it.
Your wife bribed a police officer!!
And he was cheap, too!
I’m at Weirs Beach in New Hampshire during Bike Week. I’m the only person in sight wearing a helmet besides my wife, who’s on the pillion behind me. It’s crazy hot, so I’ve got my face shield up as I pull away from the curb and start riding away at a walking pace.
A cop literally walks up to me and walks alongside me as he asks me to pull over. My face shield is still open and I haven’t exceeded walking pace.
The cop writes me a $33 ticket in 1991 dollars for “riding without eye protection” because my visor was open.
It’s the most bullshit ticket I’ve ever received. They knew I wasn’t going to make the 2 hour trek up to the courthouse and would pay it. I’ve never felt like I was ever being shaken down by the cops for money, but that event was definitely the local cops taking advantage and fining me for a completely bullshit charge.
I paid it, but that was the last time I ever went to Weir’s Beach during Bike Week in New England.
I did a 6-month study-abroad program in Prague. I was driving a rental car to Munich, and I stopped for gas. It had been snowing and my car, on its sad, all-season tires, slid into a fence.
Police showed up. They didn’t speak English and I spoke only rudimentary Czech. They gave me a ticket for… something… and I gave them a big wad of cash. It was surreal.
So you paid in cash because they wouldn’t take your Czech?
That’s a Dad Joke level pun there. I approve!
It’s times like this I lament not being able to post gifs. Prime candidate for the Chris Kattan/Fred Armisen rim shot.
Riding in my buddy’s fresh-from-the-paintbooth 1965 Riviera. Female cop who looked to be all of 14 pulls us over for not wearing seatbelts. Buddy reaches above the visor for the registration and insurance card, and in addition hands the cop her very own copy of Georgia state’s seatbelt laws that exempted the Riv from having seatbelts.
I got €300? speeding ticket because I got clocked while making a pass, due then, must pay now because I’m a foreigner. I tried to explain that I was trying to make the pass as quickly as possible so I could get out of the way of oncoming traffic, as one does. Unfortunately, this was in a Taycan Turbo S Cross Turismo loaner, so the pass was very fast. I got no mercy even though I WAS MAKING A PASS! You don’t fart around at the speed limit while passing or you’ll catch oncoming traffic!
I didn’t have enough cash on me and ended up having to call a friend over to spot me the money. It sucked. Do not mess around and/or try to pass like a normal person in the national park by Stuttgart, I guess.
While “attending” Michigan State in the late 80’s I was drunk-walking my bicycle back from the bar when a cop pulled up next to me and asked if I could prove that I owned the bike.
In my once in a lifetime actual on the spot witty retort I said “Sure, let me just dig through the glovebox for the registration”
He drove off.
I was driving in an area known for giving speeding tickets to people speeding while passing on 2-lane roads. I decided to pass a car hovering just below the speed limit was needed. While passing, I noticed a car coming at me. Because it was dusk, visual depth of field was a bit reduced. Since a car was approaching from the other direction I wanted to reduce my risk and sped up a bit more (it was an older pathfinder so great speeds were not likely). Of course, the approaching car was a police car and he immediately turned around and pulled me over. When I pointed out that my increased speed meant less time in the passing lane and reduced the chances of a head-on collision with him, he decided then that the ticket was unneeded. Still seems like a stupid way to enforce speed limits as long as the passing speed is not excessive.
I got pulled over for the same thing once. I pointed out that it was legal to exceed speed limit to pass, and he thought for a minute and said “well you were getting over from the wrong lane and by the time i recorded your speed it was back to normal”
Still gave me a civil infraction ticket for $130 because it’s how backwoods Arkansas towns survive.
Probably three decades ago at this point I was in the National Guard and driving around the city while on drill, in uniform, in an M1008 (military version of a square body Chevy pickup) when I got pulled over by a local cop because the truck was “unregistered”, as in it didn’t have plates on it. It was odd that the officer didn’t know that the registration number was stenciled on the front bumper and tailgate, and that they don’t run plates, seeing how the Venn diagram of cops and National Guard members is a camouflage circle, but there we sat at an impasse – while my CO’s Dunkin’ order got cold – until the shift supervisor rolled up and resolved the issue with some eye rolling and me going on my way without a ticket.
Dumbest because me: Punched it just seconds before the shift from a 30mph to a 55mph zone. And not shockingly, a cop was camped out right at the transition. Super lame, but should have seen it coming. Also, it’s pretty ridiculous to have such a sudden change in speed limit.
Dumbest because of cop: The only time I’ve ever been pulled over for literally zero reason was, not shockingly, because two of my passengers were darker than me. Cop basically just interrogated us and never bothered to offer a reason why I had been pulled over. Hardly even looked at me despite me being the driver.
What an eye-opener that was.
I had a similar situation. I was exiting a section of I-10 in Houston, and since there was road construction there was no normal exit ramp. Instead, one of the normal lanes just suddenly had the exit ramp attached to it. The local municipality had placed a speed limit sign on the exit ramp of 35mph, as the exit ramp was in their jurisdiction. So the situation was you either slow to 35mph while still in a main lane on I-10 or you do the normal thing and decelerate as you come down the exit ramp. I did the latter and exited at the 65mph speed limit and got a 30mph speeding ticket in a construction zone by the cop parked adjacent to the exit ramp. I actually took that one to court where I found out that I was one of 200 people there that day for the exact same speeding ticket. The judge commended me for showing up and dismissed the ticket, as he said he was tired of the township cops still running that speed trap and clogging up his court room. I’ve only had two speeding tickets in my life, and neither was a situation where I was actually speeding.
This was my first speeding ticket, so I was pretty pissed at the way I was caught. Had the speed trap been placed even in an ever so slightly more fair spot, I wouldn’t have been speeding.
There’s plenty of people out there speeding. The cops don’t need to set up traps like this.
As an adult I was pulled over in a South Dakota rental car for doing 81 in an 80 zone. The officer kindly explained that he noticed it was a rental, and that he wanted me to understand that they took the 80mph speed limit very seriously, and allowed me to leave without a written warning.
I got pulled over in my Chevy 1500 for not wearing a seatbelt. But I was wearing my seatbelt! Not sure the officer truly believed me but he did let me go without a ticket. Not a very interesting story but definitely the dumbest reason I ever got pulled over.