This spring, when I returned to my place along the 50th parallel, the first order of business was getting my truck and small equipment trailer insured. I had a couple of easy jobs lined up and I was anxious to make some folding cash. I finished the first job and was headed to the second when I rounded a corner and fell into a cop trap.
I won't burden you with details. Let's just say I have an old, reliable truck that is a bit cosmetically challenged. I paid $800 for it two years ago. Since I'm not driving a newer vehicle, the cops figured this sheep was ready for fleecing. I wasn't wearing my seat belt, I had a loose battery, one tire was down to the wear bars, had a crack in my windshield, etc. etc. They said my truck and trailer were both unsafe to drive. They pulled my plates and I had to have them both towed. Separately. It cost me a lot of money, way more than the value of the truck.
They wanted me to get everything fixed and have the truck and trailer inspected. That wasn't about to happen. I went on Craigslist and found an even nicer truck with all the standard features I was looking for: a loose battery, cracked windshield, etc. Got back on the road and I'll be damned if I didn't drive through another cop trap in the same location two weeks later. This time the four cop cars were already robbing four other drivers so I drove on through. I have not driven that route since. With cops like these who needs highwaymen?
It got me thinking. There must be an app to report police activity. I hit the Internet, but it looked like the only thing I could find was Waze. Waze is owned by Google.
I don't do Google.
Waze is a social network where users input road conditions, traffic jams and some police activity like traffic accidents, but it had too many features and wasn't really what I was looking for.
Here's a couple of those features from the Waze website:
Waze Learns your frequent destinations, commuting hours, and preferred routes
In addition you can
See friends’ ETA when driving to the same destination
Hmmm. This is from Wikipedia:
Waze sends anonymous information, including users' speed and location, back to its database to improve the service as a whole.
And
Waze invented and initiated the connected citizens program (CCP), a free data sharing program used by over 200 governments, departments of transportation and municipalities for traffic analysis, road planning and emergency work force dispatching.[13] Waze both contributes to government data and also collects government data to use.
Exactly the opposite of what I'm looking for! I want to track the police, not the other way around. But I didn't give up. There has to be an app for this. Every driver needs to know where the police are lurking. I didn't give up. I kept searching. And then I found this, way down in a comment section:
"Forget Waze. Trapster is much better."
So I started researching Trapster.
I found their website and description of the app. "Like flashing your headlights to other motorists."
Our FREE app alerts you to speed traps, red light & speed cameras, accidents, road hazards, plus more!
That's it. That's the app I want.
Before we continue I want to emphasize the problem we face with today's police and why we need to know where they are at all times.
From the National Motorists Association:
Traffic Tickets Are Big Business
No one knows how many traffic tickets are actually issued. Many local units of government deliberately hide this information so they don’t have to split their traffic ticket revenue with the state. Not including parking tickets, we can estimate that somewhere between 25 and 50 million traffic tickets are issued each year. Assuming an average ticket cost of $150.00, the total up front profit from tickets ranges from 3.75 to 7.5 billion dollars.
The article goes on to say that insurance companies are some of the biggest players behind urging police agencies to increase the amount of ticketing since, in many locations, a moving violation jacks up your insurance premiums.
In total, we’re talking about 7.5 to 15 billion dollars annually from tickets for government agencies and insurance companies.
The Free Thought Project reported in another article that in the town of Bergen New Jersey, the police started spending more time fighting actual crime than issuing traffic citations and instead gave warnings to motorists. The bureaucrats at city hall became irate because of the revenue drop and demanded that the police issue more lucrative traffic tickets. As a result, the number of tickets skyrocketed from 700 issued in January of 2016 to 3100 in July of that year, an increase of over 450 percent.
It's not the cops themselves running rough-shod over motorists. It's the bureaucrats upstairs who pull the strings at city hall.
And if that isn't bad enough, there's asset forfeiture. Most of you probably already know that cops can take your cash away from you if they think you are engaged in any sort of "criminal" activity, even if you are not. You can prove your innocence and they can still keep your money, or make it very cumbersome and time consuming to get it back. That's just one more reason to have Trapster.
Trapster was a hit right from the beginning. Pete Tenereillo founded Trapster in November of 2007. A little over a year later it had a half million users, not unlike the trajectory Steemit is now taking. By July 2009 it reached one million users. Less than a year after that it had 4 million subscribers. In 2010 Tenereillo cashed in his chips and sold Trapster to Nokia. In early 2011, Trapster was hacked and 10 million subscriber's personal information was stolen. This didn't seem to affect Trapster's popularity. By 2012 it had 17 million users.
The law enforcement agencies had mixed feelings about Trapster. The boys in blue thought it wasn't such a bad thing. It made their jobs easier since people were more inclined to be law abiding when they knew the cops were about. Of course the bureaucrats screamed that it was interfering with justice and creating a public safety hazard. It certainly would have reduced their revenues. When you know where the bandits are hiding you can avoid them. Trapster voluntarily deleted it's DUI checkpoint icon, but evidently, that wasn't enough.
On the bottom of the page on the Trapster website (which now is just a blank page), was this message:
“After evaluating our ongoing investments, we have decided to discontinue service by the end of the year.”
That was in December of 2014. Trapster had 21 million subscribers. Does that sound like an app that was failing? I tried to find out exactly what happened, but the trail is cold and dead. We can only speculate. Somebody either had a "talking to" or got a boatload of cash. The police state is alive and thriving.
But here's a bright note. I heard of a local group that has a cell phone number that you can text to when you see a cop out looking for trouble. It's very local, maybe a 40 mile radius, and the number of texts you get in a day is ridiculous. But it's unregulated and I'm glad I signed up for it. We're up to 500 users. It's worth the constant bother to know where the cops are at all times. One day I didn't even go out because it was the end of the month and they were setting up roadblocks to rob the public. Gotta meet those quotas!
I have no idea how to set something like this up, but if you're tech savvy, it shouldn't be too hard.
I reported on a cop trap just a few days ago. The cops had three cars side by side on a four lane highway; one in the center divider. There were six cars in all. When one car left to chase down a motorist, another car would pull into its waiting place. I found out from one of the cell phone texters that they were using a new license plate scanner, looking for expired insurance and registrations. This person relayed that a friend of his was pulled over because his wife's name was on the registration but she wasn't a licensed driver. Obviously, all of this information popped up on the police computer screen by simply scanning the license plate. Now that's a real crime! She wasn't driving, naturally, but it was a good excuse to pull that car over.
And after you're stopped, the extortion is just beginning.
We all need Trapster or something like it. Forewarned is Forearmed.