This morning on my way to work, I noticed a car coming up behind me pretty quickly. We aggressive drivers learn how to ID cop cars at all angles, so I instantly knew this was a State Trooper. At first I thought, hey, he's just driving like I would if I had a giant engine whose upkeep I didn't have to pay for. But, as he came up beside me (I'd moved to the right hand lane by this point), I realized he was going WAY faster even than that.
The trooper (I'm assuming it was a guy, but it might not have been) had to lock it down to keep from running into the back of the car that had been in front of me, which was still in the left lane. Car 1 was running roughly parallel to Car 2 (in front of me), but Trooper was almost a full car-length ahead of me, even with my casual definition of "safe following distance." Then Trooper got even closer to Car 1, postively drafting it for a solid minute. Then Trooper swerved over into the gap between Car 2 and me, then swerved back to the left lane. Car 1 managed to get around Car 2, out of Trooper's way, and Trooper cruised off... until he hit another phalanx of cars 100 feet up the road. (This was morning rush hour, after all.) He proceeded to bully them out of the way, one by one, until I lost sight of him. (But not his tag: SHP-1254.)
This pisses me off. As I wrote in an e-mail to the Highway Patrol later that morning, if I got caught driving like this, I'd be lucky to get out of it with a ticket. More likely, I'd risk losing my license, or even criminal charges for wreckless driving.
When we see law enforcement officers blatantly violating the law, it undermines the public's trust in them. If I, as a taxpayer, am paying a cop to enforce the law, I expect him or her to follow it, too.
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