The town I live in wants more police officers. Granted, the area has had moments of surprising violence lately — like the rolling gun battle down a local main street. This kind of thing is all the more shocking in such a relatively small community, so much of it rural.

But as far as I can tell, the place is already crawling with cops. Since early November, I’ve been pulled over five times for having a headlight out, and once for failing to stop long enough at a stop sign. A motorcycle cop followed me for three minutes tonight, presumably because of the same broken headlight. Since he didn’t stop me, I can’t be sure.

On the bright side, nobody’s given me a ticket for this stuff. But I spent over a year and a half driving around in the DC area with a headlight out, and didn’t get pulled over even once. So yeah, I really need to get my headlight bulb changed, I know. One of these days when I have a spare 15 minutes during daylight hours, I’ll head to a Jiffy Lube or something and get somebody to fix it. But all of this suggests to me that the existing cops in the area have way too much free time on their hands already. What are all the new cops gonna do — look for lost pets?