Mark K 2
Well-Known Member
What a smart way to enforce the seat belt law.
Blake Elfstrom, 22, of Maplewood, was driving his girlfriend home late Sunday morning. He was the fourth car at a stop sign before turning onto westbound Minnesota 36 from northbound McKnight Road in North St. Paul.
That was when he spotted a shabbily dressed, middle-aged man wearing glasses that seemed too big for his face. The man, who turned out to be Maplewood cop Paul Bartz, was holding up a sign "Will work for food" as he approached and looked inside the line of waiting vehicles.
Elfstrom was pondering whether to roll down his window when he saw the cars moving ahead of him. He entered the on-ramp, only to be waved to the side of the road moments later by one of several uniformed cops standing near a line of patrol cars.
He asked the cop why he was being pulled over. The officer told him his girlfriend was in violation of a 9-month-old law that gives Minnesota law enforcement the authority to pull over drivers and occupants for not wearing seat belts.
"How in the world did you know?" Elfstrom asked the ticketing officer.
"That homeless guy back there? He's an officer," the cop replied.
"I saw about 10 other cars pulled over as he wrote out the (summons)," said Elfstrom, who recently
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graduated from college. "Yes, I was quite surprised by it."
Elfstrom's girlfriend was tagged for $108 the state-mandated $25 fine for a first-time offender, plus the $75 the law allows as a petty-misdemeanor surcharge fee repeat after me: this is not a tax, it's a fee that goes into the state general fund. The remaining $8 repeat again: it's not a tax, it's a fee goes to fund law libraries.
Officers from Maplewood, North St. Paul, the Ramsey County sheriff's office and the State Patrol issued 122 citations during the 3 1/2-hour operation, according to Dave Kvam, Maplewood's deputy police chief.
The vast majority of tickets 103 were for not wearing seat belts. Two involved child-seat restraint violations. Three were for license revocation or suspension penalties. Six involved motorists with no proof of insurance and eight were for other traffic- or vehicle-related infractions.