Caught you....

A few weeks ago, the police stopped some drug traffickers here in Central Oregon. They stopped them because their car was "weaving...."

Wow! I thought at the time. How stupid do you have to be to be weaving your car while you have drugs?

A couple of weeks later, same thing. Drug smugglers on Highway 97, stopped because they were straying into the other lane.

Again, I think, Wow! Were they partaking of their own goods?

Then on Thursday this week -- you guessed it -- druggies caught again because: "...after seeing it drift into another lane of traffic and nearly hit another vehicle."

Mug shots of these guys make them look guilty as hell. Yep -- that's what drug smugglers look like. Then again, mug shots make everyone look as guilty as hell.

I don't remember if all these three crews were Hispanic -- it seems to me that one of them wasn't. In a day and age when profiling is frowned upon, police need a good excuse to stop guilty looking guys.

Driving to Redmond with Linda a few days ago, I started to realize that just about every driver on the road "drifts" a little, sometimes up to and slightly over the lines. I mean, drifting would seem to be unchallengeable -- in the eye of the beholder.

Just saying -- not sure I disagree. I mean, while profiling seems a very slippery slope, I also have to believe that enforcement officials probably have pretty good instincts. So while I can't approve of racial profiling as an official policy, I believe we have to give the police some leeway on doing their job.

Like most of these issues, it isn't black and white.