[Rob Petrie E395]

Bret
We call it a fishing expedition around here as it happens all the time EVERYDAY. I cant tell you how many repair orders I write every year for one bulb or some other minor deal that the car owner was written a ticket for. We or another shop write a RO and replace the bulb and charge the customer a few bucks. All of our local counties dismiss the charge with a repair order. If you fix it yourself no dice. They (Cops) really dont give a damn about your light or any of that stuff its a excuse to legally pull you over. What they are looking for is the good stuff that pays well like DUI or no insurance. But when you are out late at night and have not been drinking, dont have drugs or guns and spot lights in the car and have insurance they are forced to write you for something to justify the stop. So they write you the BS ticket. The other new BS deal in our great state is all of the small towns adopting the state code. What this does is they can write tickets and keep all of the money for themselves with out giving any to the county or state if you pay the ticket at town hall. Nobody fights the tickets because if you lose it goes against you on your license. If you just pay it the state and your insurance co. never know about it because the small towns are not required to report to the state violations of thier local "city" laws. Another little piece of good info for anybody who gets a ticket in IL is this. Every county in IL has whats called "Court supervision" and all you have to do is ask for it. Some counties it even states on the back of the ticket how to do it. What it amounts to is they add some more money to the ticket, you pay it and they set a time period (usually 3 months) if you dont get another ticket in that county during the time period it all goes away and the Sec of states office ( where we go for our DL and tags) never knows about it and therefore your insurance company does not either. You can be on court supevison on every county in IL at the same time. But you can only get it once every 365 days in each county. I have never got a ticket. But know plenty who have. My son got a ticket for 93 in a 55 at 16 having only had his license for maybe 2 months. We had to goto court and asked the states attourney if he was eligable. She said sure but get ready he is going to get a chewing from the judge. I could not believe it how easy it was. He took his butt chewing paid 250 and stayed out of Marion Co for 3 months. The hardest part for him was no driving for 90 days imposed by ME! I will give anybody a hundred bucks if you can drive past a Centrallia IL cop with a light out and not get a ticket they are the worst for these BS fishing expedition tickets