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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Civil Disobedience

A story true insofar as I understand it.

By Bill.

(NOTE: Originally published as an e-mail to my incredibly unsympathetic friends - if you are one of these people, you need read no further and guess what I'm doing with my finger)

Recently (last night, in fact) I found myself in Trinidad, Colorado. This should actually be the punchline, but in this rare instance, the story begins here. It is about 9 pm and I decide to find the county courthouse so that I can complete my business efficiently in the morning so as not to spend more time in Trinidad then is absolutely necessary. This said, Trinidad is consistently ranked among the top small towns in the country in which to live. It is clean, has a lot of nice old buildings, a quasi-trendy Highlands Squarish area (the area at 32nd and Lowell in Denver, if ya don' know), nestled up against the mountains and has many wonderful opportunities for those who feel they were born in the wrong body. Ahem. It also has exceedingly polite police officers, which is either foreshadowing or ruining the surprise.

First of all, I find the county courthouse as pictured on the Colorado Counties Online website only to find that it is actually the Trinidad City Hall. A cool building, but an odd mistake to make and possibly a sign from god. There appears to be nobody else on the street, but there are some nice Christmas lights and I'm looking around for street signs and that's a cool looking coffee shop and suddenly there are flashing lights in my rearview mirror. I'm driving about 15 in a 25, I'm pretty sure my tail lights work and my car is not stolen to the best of my knowledge. So I'm not that worried. I got pulled over in Utah once because the state trooper was lonely. Happens.

The Governor taught me well and I have my license, registration and proof of insurance ready for the scary man with the gun before he ever leaves his car. Officer Giles (cause that's the guy's name) is very friendly and explains to me that I went straight out of a left-turn only lane. He guesses correctly that I am from out of town, because the intersection is "a little weird" and that people from out of town "do that all the time." The guy assures me he will not give me a ticket. I'm sure everyone is expecting a patented Bill rant here because the situation clearly begs for it, but the guy really is polite and besides, the story gets infinitely worse from this point.

So he goes back to his car for the interminable process of clearing my license. I don't know why this always takes so long, but it does. Not going to rant here, either. Be patient.

My first indication that something is wrong is that another police car has arrived and another police officer is trying to sneak up on my car from the passenger side. The guy looks like Hagrid, so his attempts to blend in behind light poles are funny, butwhy would anyone, much less a cop, try to sneak up on me? Another sign from god? More clumsy foreshadowing?

Officer Giles invites me politely out of my car while Officer Hagrid unholsters his gun. I'm wondering why a guy that size needs a gun. Before I know what's going on, I'm resisting arrest. Officer Giles explains to me in twenty words or less that I am driving with a suspended license which is a misdemeanor and so I am going to jail.

Umm...what?

Apparently I am due no more explanation than this. Squeaky Fromme might have said something like "it wasn't me, it wasn't me" but they arrested her anyway. There were no niceties observed, no Miranda Rights, nothing. Just handcuffs. And even in Trinidad, real cops don't use the fur-lined kind.

It's really not that busy in the Las Animas County Jail on Wednesday nights, so I had three police officers dedicated to nothing but my paperwork for about 45 minutes. Arresting somebody involves a lot of paperwork. They have to confiscate everything you have on your person, including your shoes. Jails are cold, so this is probably just psychological warfare (I was wearing slip-ons, after all). So they have to catalog all your stuff and place it in a plastic sheath comically marked "INMATE PROPERTY BAG". I got to keep it. It's sweet.

To complete the paperwork, they sit you on a stool and chain you to the cinderblock counter. It's a single handcuff anchored in like a shackle, just barely short enough that you cannot put your hands on the counter. I had one fellow prisoner, a comrade of no great intellect who was inexplicably not chained to the counter. While I do not know what he was in for, my bond was $500 and his was $65,000. He was also effusively grateful for having been arrested, regularly calling god's blessing down upon the police officers. He was probably a regular with his own stool and everything. And he probably understood all the questions.

There seems to be an assumption that you have been arrested before. I suppose even the most hardened criminal is at some point arrested for the first time, but maybe there are starter counties for that kind of thing and only the true reprobates and recidivist bastards are arrested in Trinidad. The guy asks me if I have any scars. They actually require me to have a local contact. Finally, he asks me if I intend to post bond.

"I don't even know what that BLEEEP means."

Now, I'm not stupid and I have watched television and I know what bond is, but I'm not sure how to post it. I didn't have $500 in cash on me, but I did have a checkbook and a couple of credit cards. Interestingly, even if I had had $500 in cash on me, I could not have posted my own bond because they confiscate your stuff, so technically you have no money when it comes time to post bond. Apparently, you legally have to leave with all of the stuff you came in with, which is not technically true because if you do not claim it after thirty days of your release they donate all your stuff to some sort of indigent persons fund, but that's the explanation I was given.

They asked me if I had any medical conditions nine times. I was going to do what I do with my mother and start giving different answers every time they asked, but as they were unamused with my statement about my bond I figured further shenanigans would result in my being Rodneyed.

So I get fingerprinted, get six different mugshots taken (I have a theatre degree so I tried to give them a little different look every time), and got to call a bail bondsman. A bail bondsman charges you 15f your bond to post it for you and then hunts you down like a dog in the street if you don't show up for your court date. Of course, being from out of town and therefore difficult to hunt down like a dog in the street, my bail bondsman simply put the entire bond, his fee and a $10 paperwork fee on my credit card (which Officer Giles kindly let me have back for the occasion). So I paid $75 for a ride to my car as I essentially posted my own bond and the bail bondsman doesn't really care if I show up for my court date. All the same, I would recommend Chris Velasquez to any of you arrested in Trinidad (and you know who you are) just a guy working to put his 14 year-old daughter through Catholic school.

I got put in a holding cell, not once but twice. It's cold and I had no shoes on, so I was almost ready to talk. If I had been there longer they would have issued me shoes, which I got to see on my tour of the facility (everyone was quite happy to indulge my curiosity once I got over being belligerent). They're basically slippers but they wouldn't let me try them on because that would have resulted in their having to disinfect them again, a job everyone hates.

Officer Giles did have to charge me with not turning out of a turn-only lane. I checked out the intersection the next morning there's no sign and even in broad daylight it looks like the right lane is right turn only and one should go straight out of the left lane, but as this is not my biggest quibble with my time in Trinidad I'm willing to drop it. The other thing they gave me was the phone number at the DMV that I could call and find out why my license was suspended because the people who arrested me, and I am not making this up, have no way of knowing. Seriously. I almost resisted arrest attempting to get information, just a little bit of information like "what the hell did I do to get arrested?" (because most people probably know the answer to that question) that the police DON'T EVEN HAVE.

So I call the DMV. Everyone at the DMV is miserable. I don't know whether they only hire miserable people or if they have to train them, but the woman refers me to Logan County Court where I have an unpaid violation from October 2003. While I did get a ticket in Logan County in 2003 (in fact, I was on the phone with Fuzzy when I got it), I paid it. So I'm puzzled. The woman dispassionately explains that I need to obtain proof from Logan County that I paid this ticket, come in to a reinstatement center and pay $60 to reinstate my license and then hangs up on me. Because she's miserable.

I call Logan County Court and give them the information. I'm not even in their system anymore, so she has to go to the archives, come back and says, I kid you not, "no, you shouldn't be. We sent notification to the DMV that it was paid."

So, due to some $8 an hour clerk's mistake (oops), I:

1. Got arrested.
2. Got handcuffed.
3. Had to get out of a police car while handcuffed, which is almost impossible.
4. Got my shoes confiscated.
5. Got fingerprinted.
6. Spent two hours in jail.
7. Got my own bail bondsman.
8. Have to pay at least $145 (at least $75 of that will at least go to putting Chris' daughter through Catholic school).
9. Have to go back to Trinidad on December 22 to prove to them that everything's fine and get my $500 back.

And then I had to drive back to Denver with a suspended license, so I could potentially have gone to jail in six more counties.

That's my story. I feel like it should be a cautionary tale, but short of suggesting that everyone call the DMV to see if your license is suspended (because the DMV won't tell you otherwise), I don't know what to caution you about.

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