You Better Watch Out, You Better Not Pout

A looong time ago, I was coming home from my parents house and as always, I inevitably had to pass through the small town of Rogers, The Speed Trap Capital of the World. I am not kidding. As a teenager, Shawn actually got pulled over once for having long hair. (I wouldn’t make that up)

A friend of mine has a son who has had numerous tickets in Rogers, one for doing 55 mph five feet before the 55 mph sign. He got a hefty fine.

I know several people who have been stopped for reasons they normally wouldn’t have been if they were passing through a normal town. Anyway, on this trip, I noticed a sign at the gate of some property. This sign wasn’t just made haphazardly on an old salvaged piece of cardboard. Someone paid to have this sign made up special. In bright yellow and black, it read:

Welcome to Rogers The Speed Trap Capital of the World (with some smaller print at the bottom I couldn’t read because I was driving too fast)

I laughed and laughed all the way home!

That was about a year ago. Maybe two. But I never saw that sign again. “Those cops probably made him take it down. Probably threatened him with something--some information they had on him or something…” I told Shawn. I thought of it as nothing more than an infringement on the land owner’s freedom of speech. But something more was going on. No one in their right mind would volunteer to take down that sign. It was most likely cutting into the cops’ monthly quota.

Last Sunday Shawn and I were coming home after a brief visit with the parents and there it was! The most truth filled sign I have ever seen in my life!

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “It’s back!”

“Yeah,” Shawn said. “It was on the news. The whole thing. They had the cops on the news and the guy that put up the sign. He said he’d gotten 2 tickets in 3 years.”

“Well, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten those tickets if he hadn’t been speeding,” I laughed, because EVERYBODY around here knows not to speed through Rogers.

“The cops said out of 467 traffic stops, they’d only given out 300 and something tickets in the last month,” Shawn said.

“Only?! Between 2 cops, how do they give out that many tickets?! The ones that didn‘t get tickets were probably rushing to the hospital in labor and even then I bet they got written warnings,” I laughed. But that’s what they do These guys don’t even sleep; they‘re like cyborgs. Picture Arnold from the Terminator movies, only dorkier and with a horrible southern accent and pot belly. Their life’s mission is to dole out as many tickets as possible and work for a bonus.

I would suspect that the landowner with the sign had a friend or a cousin that was a lawyer and threatened the town legal action for not being allowed to place a sign on his own property. I guess we’ll never know the whole story, because the bit on the news has some contradictions of its own.

“The cops said the sign was a good idea,” Shawn said. “They said it would keep the town safer by minimizing speeding.”

Yeah right. Then why did they make the man take it down to have it suddenly reappear? Sure, I believe ya.