… because the police here has nothing better to do than stopping bikers that bike the on the pavement, and extract the exorbitant sum of €5 from them. This is what happened to me yesterday, when I wanted nothing but get home after a hard days of work – the shortest route leads past a police station, just before turning off a big street. For the last few months, I have been biking the wrong way past the police station, without ever getting stopped. A. warned me however that – this being Germany – I would sooner or later run into trouble.
I wonder how much money it actually cost to stop me, have 2 cops talking to me for about 15 minutes, write me a bill on paper which then has to be hand typed into the computer, checked against my details, mailing a letter with the warning to my home, and check whether I payed. No wonder Berlin is broke.
It is not so much the €5 I have to pay that bugs me (if I ever receive that bill), what really irritates me is one of the two cops did not even see the irony of the situation – for him, it was more than normal to stop a biker biking slowly on a HUGE pavement, where no people (other than the police) was walking. The concept of tolerance, or of proportionality, or of interpreting law within reason was something that did not even occur to him. (I have to add, the other cop, a woman, had the decency of feeling slightly embarrassed, or so I thought.) Of course, I can already hear the copper say that corruption and anarchy would be the result if everyone interpreted the law as he or she saw fit. However, I beg to differ, and point to for example the Netherlands, where tolerance or “dogen” is practised with great success (in areas such as soft drugs, but also in general). I cannot but wonder whether it is a particulcarly German straight, this “following the rules”, and not wanting to take responsibility for the actions.
This one cop suggested that if I didn’t like the rule, I should get politically active and have them change the law. It is not the law per se that needs to be changed though, as driving dangeously on the pavement is something that should not be condoned. It is the ability (of for example that particular cop) to look around and see that no harm whatsoever is done, that the rule in that particular case is absurd, and that a wagging finger would have had the same result. But that requires more than political action committees.
b.
