I will not complain about getting the ticket as the sign was clearly posted and I did not observe the posted sign.
The problem is that there were between 5 and 7 police officers waiting down this road that I turned on to. They are represented by the red circles on the picture.
I turned from 301 to palmetto rd. As soon as I get onto the road an officer walks in to the middle of the road near jefferson street and puts his hand up in a motion for me to stop near him. I stop in the middle of my lane by him. I go to pull off of the side of the road to not block the road and he yells at me.
Again, there are 5~7 other police officers parked in this location and all just standing around laughing and talking until their next victim comes down the road.
There was no niceness to this interaction like you sometimes get with an officer. "License and registration!" He snatches them without saying a word and walks to his cruiser. He returns to me a minute later and hands me my copy of the ticket and tells me I've got 30 days to pay. In the place of my signature he put I.D. Florida DL. He made no request for me to sign.
So, I've got a nice $151 fine to pay. I'll take care of it as I did commit the infraction I was accused of. FL 316.074(1).
My problem isn't the ticket, it's that they had so many officers in this location. I can understand one or two post there, but 5~7! Come on guys, you are just standing around most of the time.
So, I got my ticket and pulled into the church parking lot. Having a little sense about me I went inside and requested permission to sit on their property for awhile(don't want a loitering charge too!) So, I parked my bike on the church lot and proceeded to take a seat on the ground on the Church's private property. All I wanted to do was watch the situation. I would have taken pictures/video, but my phone was dead
. I sat there for about 30 minutes. In that time I was approached and harassed by different officers multiple times! Each time they threatened me with some bogus of "interrupting police" or something like that. In response I simply said, "Thank you for letting me know". When they saw I wasn't leaving they'd walk away saying something that sounded rude.In the 30 minutes that I was there I say close to 10 vehicles cited for making the left turn. What was interesting was that with each new car that came down the road a different officer would write the citation. It seemed like they went in turns, but I did not observe them long enough to establish that. I noticed that each time a car was pulled over the officer was not in his vehicle for much more then a minute and did not offer the driver of the vehicle to sign the ticket. It may be a bold statement, but it seemed that the officers had these tickets mostly filled out!
I will note that the reason that people turn left is due to the light cycle at 301 & Balm Riverview Rd. The line of traffic backs up over the river and the light allows ~6 cars per cycle. This creates quite a long wait. If you turn left on Palmetto a few more cars can turn before the light cycles and allows northbound traffic on 301 to go.
So, in conclusion, these officers seemed to not be interested in the safety of the general public. With the 5~7 officers removed from calls that means the 5~7 fewer officers can respond to a real emergency call(probably doesn't work that way...) The infraction of turning left between 3pm and 7pm was not so severe as to warrant 5~7 police officers on site!
