A waitress at Buffalo Wild Wings in Prince William County
was a bit put out when eight plainclothes police officers were seated at her
table. It seems the plainclothes boys were armed and their weapons were very
visible. According to the report, the waitress refused to serve them because
she was afraid of the weapons and they eventually left the restaurant hungry.
When the restaurant’s management found out later they were
of course apologetic. I mean, after all, if they were to treat all of the
police officers who came to the restaurant the same way, the officers might
take umbrage. In fact, they might even resort to sniping the establishment’s
regular customers by lying in wait in the medians of the local highways and pulling
any cars that were suspicious for anything from a broken headlight to weaving.
On the other hand, do we really want our restaurants full of
armed people whose weapons are readily in view by the wait staff and presumably
other patrons?
What to do, what to do?
Well refusing to serve them is one answer, and while it may
not be the right or best answer, at least the waitress made her point. There are
way too many problems with people with guns so why should we treat the police
differently? It would be one thing if they were there responding to an
emergency call about a robbery or something. But this group of officers was
there merely to eat. So why not leave your main weapon locked in the car?
It’s not like the hot sauce is going on a rampage. And, I am
sure, the officers would frown on a patron being inside and packing a .38, even
if they had a conceal-carry permit. I can’t blame the food server for her
actions.
On the other hand getting back to paragraph 2, don’t you
think that the police sit in the medians waiting for their DUI prey to come out
of any of the local establishments, like B-Dubs, Applebee’s, or Ruby Tuesday’s?
Several years ago, the Colonial Heights Police Department wrote a record 450
DUIs in one year. By contrast, the City of Richmond only wrote about 500. And
that’s not to mention all of the other citations that went out when there
wasn’t enough probable cause to administer a field sobriety test or when the
driver passed the test.
While I appreciate the local police cleaning up the drunk
drivers, I wonder how ethical it is for them to pull someone over for a bad
headlight and turn that into a DUI. In some ways, it seems like a
bait-and-switch sale at a local store. They are illegal, and it seems to me
that stopping someone for a minor infraction in hopes (yes in hopes) of nabbing
a drunk driver is borderline entrapment.
For the record, if you go out for a night on the town in
Colonial Heights and either can’t control how much you drink or don’t have a
designated driver, then you get what you deserve. I figured that one out a long
time ago, and while I don’t drink very much—maybe an occasional beer or glass
of wine—I usually only do so when I am home or in some place where I know I
will not be driving. Nothing, and I mean nothing in the world, is worth risking
getting a DUI.
And then, when I get to thinking that having five police
officers roaming the streets 24-7 is a bit over the top for a city as small as
CH, something crops up to make me alter my perspective. For instance, Saturday
night when my wife and I were leaving a farewell party for one of our friends,
I noticed a patrol car go whizzing by on Ellerslie Ave. As usual, I watched the
car in my rearview mirror and noticed that the blue lights were put out at the
top of the bridge over I-95.
As I sat at the light at Conduit and Ellerslie, I noticed
another patrol car go flying through the intersection heading in the same
direction with lights blazing. Come to find out later that the CHPD were
Johnny-on-the-Spot to track down a shoplifter who had absconded from the Food
Lion with his pockets full of stolen merchandise. It seems every time I start to
wonder about being over-policed, something like this crops up and makes me
think that having so much of a police presence may not really be that bad.
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