Honk If You Support Your Local Police
Recently in my fair city, an elderly man with an artificial hip that gives him trouble pulled up in a local park at 4:30in the afternoon and tooted his horn (twice) to get his brother’s attention to get him to walk over to the car. The older gentleman, who describes himself as a law-abiding citizen and a church-going man, was promptly subdued by our vigilant police force. Bypassing the issuance of a warning, an officer immediately wrote up a citation detailing the criminal’s activity. His heinous offense cost the horn-tooting villain more than $100!
You see, my city has an ordinance against unauthorized horn honking. A horn can only be sounded legally in an emergency situation or in a parade. I suppose the fellow is lucky that he did not get two citations totaling $200 since he tooted his horn twice. Maybe we should lobby General Motors to install little glass covers over our automobile horns with instructions to “only break glass in case of emergency…or parade.”
In view of overvigilant enforcement of laws such as the one forbidding most horn-honking, it is unfortunate that the Andy Griffith Show is no longer being produced for television. The recent scenario would have made an excellent episode in which an overeager Barney issues a citation for unauthorized horn-tooting to one of the citizens of Mayberry and Andy, in his calm, fatherly manner and Southern drawl, explains to Barney that “When we enforce silly little petty laws like that, we turn honest citizens into criminals and cause bad feelings between the people and the po-lice.” I can almost hear Andy now: “They’re good people, Barn, and they didn’t mean no harm. Now go on back out there and apologize.”
However, the way things work now is that those silly laws are enforced, revenue is collected and the citizens grow distrustful of the police. Often, the police then request and receive federal grants for programs to foster goodwill between the police force and the citizens it serves. Isn’t it lucky we live in one of the richest countries in the world? This type of logic would bankrupt a poorer nation.
My plan? I’m going to print up bumper stickers that say, “Honk if you support your local police.”
We need a little more Andy and a little less Barney.
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