The shooting of the police officer in Pine Lake yesterday is horrific and unforgiveable. I can never understand what people are thinking in situations like that and, I suspect, that they just aren’t thinking at all.

It all started with a routine traffic stop. In Pine Lake. Though completely unrelated to yesterday, traffic stops have quite a history in Pine Lake. In 1999, a huge story broke about Pine Lake raising money through traffic stops. In fact, this town of 900 brought in nearly $850,000 through traffic stops (the only publicly availaible link I could quickly find is this one – I don’t know how reliable it is). Apparently (link from same place), protestors caused Pine Lake to lose a large portion of the proceeds by moving their cases to the DeKalb County Court (someone more versed in traffic law than I will have to explain it, but it seems that you can pay your traffic ticket in several different courts – for convenience to you – and that affects where the money goes…).

I don’t know where the relevance of any of this is and, of course, it means nothing about the tragedy that took place yesterday. But the history of these things always interests me…

Notes: I am, obviously, not a reporter so this is a little rambling and less full of facts than it should be. I first heard about this traffic trap issue from some people who have lived for, well, forever. A real reporter would have done some more checking out and would have at least gone past the second page of Google searches.