But otherwise? Why would you? Plumbers don't constitute a menace. Law enforcers, on the other hand. . . .

Almost everyone gets a little edgy when they glance in the rearview and see one behind them – or up ahead, sitting by the side of the road. Why is that? After all, the majority of us are not criminals.

But there is a law we may have failed to obey.

The distinction is important.

Criminals, properly speaking, are the minority among us who actively seek to harm others, in the literal sense of the italicized word. Criminals deliberately commit acts of violence. They accost people physically – sometimes just because they're thugs and enjoy doing that sort of thing. Or they threaten to accost them physically, so as to get them to hand over their property. Some just take (or deliberately damage) the property of others when the owner isn't there to accost.

This is the essence of criminality.

Then there are "offenses" against "the law." These are usually not criminal in that no one has been done violence by someone else driving his car without an up-to-date inspection sticker or windows tinted "too dark." There are many such offenses. Arguably, too many.

These "offenses" are – fundamentally – affronts to the authority of the government – and that is fundamentally what law enforcement exists to punish.

The term itself conveys this. Laws are to be enforced. Not because anyone has been harmed but because the law must be enforced. One often hears law enforcers themselves admit this.

They will say, "it's the law."

Not that whatever it is you did was criminal.

They know it wasn't – and you know it wasn't. Yet it doesn't matter, to the enforcer of the law. Consider the mentality of that. Try to get in the headspace of that. How does a psychologically normal person square a sense of personal decency with getting paid to "pull people over" – who are not criminals – and hector them over contrived offenses, ending with the gussied-up extortion of handing them a "ticket" that will cost them  possibly hundreds of dollars they probably worked very hard for?