Open Letter To Police Officers In New York State

If you are a police officer, please read this, or if you know someone who is a police officer, please send this their way.

Attention all police officers, state troopers, and county sheriffs if you could please stop doing this, the people in New York would forever be grateful.

If you could please stop following closely behind us when we are driving that would be great. Your presence makes us nervous, even though we are not doing anything wrong.

This week, this happened to me. I was on my way to work and out of nowhere a police car moved from the left lane to directly behind me. I was doing the speed limit and it was early in the morning so there wasn't a lot of traffic.

Even though I knew I wasn't doing anything wrong, I got nervous.

Many other drivers get nervous as well when a police car pulls behind them. Our brains start working overdrive trying to remember if we messed up. "Did I come to a complete stop or was it a rolling stop?", "Is 3 miles per hour over the speed limit going too fast?", "Did I merge into my lane too fast?"

I get it, police officers have to get from place to place as well. They are also on the lookout for bad people and want to enforce the law when it is being broken, but for 90% of the drivers on the road in New York having a cop driving right behind makes us nervous for no reason.

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I know what you are going to say, "If you are not doing anything wrong you shouldn't be nervous." You are right, but most drivers go a little over the speed limit, maybe make a lane shift without a blinker, or slowly roll through that stop sign.

If you have been on the roads in New York you know that we are not great drivers and in the back of our mind, we all think we are going to get pulled over for these minor infractions. 

In the future, if police officers could just go ahead of us on the road that would be great, or better yet, throw on the sirens and zoom past us, so we can all just exhale in relief.