“I can’t be ticketed if you are not wearing a hat.”
It’s one of the myths members of the Saskatoon police traffic unit are dispelling in a series of tweets.
Staff Sgt. Patrick Barbar, a member of the unit, said the service decided to debunk the myths after receiving some interesting questions.
It started after an officer caught a speeding driver on radar.
“(The officer) said to me ‘it would be great if we could tweet this out and let people know that they don’t have an absolute right to come back to the police car to look at the radar,’” Barbar told Global News.
The idea then took off using the hashtag #policemyths.
Barbar said the myth over the hat recently happened to him when he stopped a speeder going 40 km/h over the limit on the highway.
“I gave him the ticket and he looked at me with this knowing smile and said ‘where’s your hat?’”
Barbar reacted quickly to the situation.
“I knew what he was getting at, and he was wearing a hat,” he recalled.
“So I told him ‘well you’re wearing a hat sir, so as long as one of us is, we’re good to go.’”
Another popular myth is if an officer doesn’t show up to traffic court, a violator can get out of a ticket.
“The original myth was the police won’t show because we don’t get paid to go,” Barbar said.
“We get paid to go to court.”
Barbar said there are extenuating circumstances why an officer may not be at court, like illness or a death in the family, which could result in an adjournment.
Drivers have also argued police can’t issue tickets if they are not in their jurisdiction.
Barber said the combined services unit, which includes Saskatoon Police Service, is involved in traffic enforcement on highways around the province in tandem with the RCMP.
“When you stop someone in Kindersley or wherever, you’d get questioned on whether or not you’d be allowed to be here,” Barbar explained.
“We have to reassure them that we hadn’t gone rogue, that we were allowed to be where we were.”
You can follow the SPS traffic unit on Twitter and play along or pose questions policing myths or facts.
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