SO I WAS ARRESTED TONIGHT

which is why this is all I am able to write about.. it's 2am.

from inside my cell…

Around 10pm, my son went out for the evening to meet friends, driving our Toyota. At 10:32 I heard the phone ring. Inside my spirit, I already knew it was my son, and that something was wrong. It was..

He had been pulled over by a police car that electronically identified our Toyota as uninsured. Except it IS and always has been insured. This had happened to him 2 weeks earlier, and he showed them the policy, so we thought it was over and done with. What no one told us, including DMV, is that the uninsured vehicle allegation led the DMV to suspend our registration. None of us knew that.

Reminds me of back in 2020…. When the time came to renew the car registration, we went to our local DMV, and were told that - due to covid - we had to ‘make an appointment to re-register the car’. OK. So we made an appointment and were given December 31st, 2020.

When we got to DMV for the appointment, we were told, ‘We can’t register your car, because the State put a moratorium on registrations.

THREE WEEKS later we were pulled over for the registration being out of date. I told the nice officers that we had tried to register it, but ‘there was a moratorium’. To which they replied.. “They lifted the moratorium”, and went ahead and gave me a ticket.

Tonight, for some reason the insurance card was not in the glove compartment, so Nick called me, and I jumped in our other car, a Honda, to bring proof of insurance to the police.

I got there and got GEICO on the phone, who verified that we HAD insurance and that there had been no lapse.

The officer told me - ‘We have to tow your car anyway’.

I was incredulous. “Why do you have to tow the car when I just proved to you with a live agent, that the car is insured and always has been?”

“Because DMV has it as uninsured, and the registration suspended for lack of insurance’.

The 3 ring circus was apparent only to me. I said ‘Sir, if the ‘registration suspension was predicated on an alleged lack of insurance'… and I just proved there was no lack of insurance’,.. then you shouldn’t have to tow the car’.

I got nowhere with the cop. I mean, having proved I had insurance the whole time, thanks to a live Geico agent, why not give me a ticket for the ‘registration suspension predicated on no insurance’.. and let me prove it to the judge? The towed vehicle would not only be a $300 ticket, but a hardship. (It happened to be a time when I don’t have the $300 and if the car sits in hock they charge you by the day.)

All this time I was standing on a street sidewalk across from the police cars, a distance from my own Toyota that my son was sitting in, and the police decided they’d had enough of explaining things to me and ordered me to go sit in my car (Honda). That this was ‘none of my business’.

I said, begging to differ, ‘..but its MY car you’re about to tow, and my insurance, and I am on a public street, and I am not interfering with your business.’ I stood still.

Then the officer - a fairly burly guy about 6 foot tall, assaulted me. He shoved me in the direction of my Honda, VERY ROUGHLY. I was INCREDULOUS.

I have zero experience with this sort of affair, so my instinct was to ‘stand fast’. I hollered at him ‘YOU have no business touching me!’. He was in my face at that point, and then his partner, a portly female cop came to my other side and the two of them started to yank my arms behind my back..

Keep in mind, this is about a vehicle that I had just proved was insured.

Friend, I was in the military. I have been a cab driver. I have been in innumerable situations in life, but had no experience having 2 burly cops shove and manhandle me. So I kept trying to stay where I was, and keep my arms in front of me.

My son filmed the entire fiasco, and I’m glad he didn’t attempt to come near to me or help me in any way, as shocked as he was, he was afraid they’d draw their guns if he did!

So I was arrested;

Taken in with handcuffs in the back of a patrol car;

Fingerprinted;

Questioned;

Photographed.

All because DMV never let me know that my registration had been suspended - any more than they let me know in 2021 that they had LIFTED the vehicle registration moratorium. (I guess early 2021 was a lucrative time for ticket writing)

And the State of NY has this stuff in computers, so that as you drive by the cops are alerted. What we have is not a police force to protect the public, but a DMV task force.

What I can’t understand is after I proved the car WAS insured, and that DMV WAS wrong - why not just ticket us for the ‘suspended registration’ & let a judge do the judging?

Why assault a 68 year old woman doing nothing but standing on the sidewalk taking it in, that her car is about to be towed for no good reason? Why assault me?

Then why arrest me pretty brutally (we got it on film) over a victimless ‘crime’ like this?

Oh and I forgot to mention, since they arrested me, they towed our Honda also. Now we have a $600 tab for no reason at all…

America. Land of the free..

I’m writing this to glean opinons from the American peanut gallery.. Is this what I served 17 years in the US military for.. so cops could rough up a 68 year old woman for not leaving a public sidewalk?

My bad?