The Best Traffic Ticket Excuse...EVER!

This is one of my occasional funny police stories first posted last October. Although not pet related, I figured my new subscribers would enjoy this essay.

It was after 2:00 a.m. and I was working uniformed patrol as a police officer for the U.C. Santa Cruz Police Department on the graveyard shift. I was bored, tired, and watching for stop sign runners who’d likely give me a D.U.I. at that time of a night. I watched as a nice BMW rolled up and kept rolling right through the stop sign without stopping.

Pulling people over for traffic violations and listening to their excuses was the most amusing part of my job (Photo credit: Deposit photos)

I pulled the car over and discovered that it was two nice young students on their way back to their dorm. I asked the nicely dressed driver for his license, registration, and proof of insurance and asked if he knew why I’d stopped him.

The driver said, “Yes officer, I didn’t stop because I didn’t want to knock over my food art.”

OK. I was intrigued.

“Food art?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m a chef and I attended a graduation party and they had a food art contest and I won first place.” He pointed to an object teetering on the edge of his dashboard.

I shined my flashlight and low and behold, he had a very creative (and quite good, I might add) replica of the English Stonehenge made of parsley and tiny carrots. Having a good sense of humor, not to mention the fact I was delighted and surprised that I’d pulled over an artist who was not only clean cut (not the typical smelly-hippy-non-bather-student) but was actually sober. I decided to have some fun.

Me (left) with hot chef (right) with his prize “food art.” (Photo credit: Passenger who used my Polaroid camera)

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said to the driver.

“Yes officer?” he said.

“That has got to be, by far, THE BEST, excuse for not stopping at a stop sign that I’ve ever heard in my career. If your buddy there will take a picture of you and me with your food art, I will let you go with a warning.”

“Deal!” he said.

I still have the Polaroid picture of me smiling next to that very talented, lucky and somewhat HOT food artist. And yes, our police department was so underfunded that we actually were expected to take crime scene photos with a Polaroid camera! Because the photo (above) is a digital photo of a Polaroid picture, his blurry carrots look little tiny Vienna sausage weenies instead of carrots.

So please, comment below about your best traffic ticket excuse. What did you say in your attempt to con a cop out of a ticket? Or, do you have an interesting traffic stop story to share? Did you end up with Officer Grumpy, Officer Ticket-Giver, or Officer Fun (like me)?

And if you have any questions about how to avoid getting a traffic ticket (hint, hint: USE YOUR BLINKER!), just ask me in the comments!