BAY MINETTE — “This is my favorite,” she said with a smile as she flips on her flashing, blue lights and pulls up behind a green Crown Victoria on McMeans Avenue.

“Look at it from my view,” Bay Minette police officer Rene Peebles said. “You see a car with two busted out tail lights and a car lot tag. Ask yourself, does that look like a car someone just sold off a car lot?”

The driver tells officer Peebles he has just bought the car from his ex-wife, and she is not going to give him a bill of sale until he gives her the last payment. He has a valid drivers license and proof of insurance, and he drives away with the warning he could be pulled over again at any moment.

“A car like that, 99 percent of the time will not have the information they need in the car,” she said. “It just makes sense to check, but they are not necessarily doing anything wrong.”

Slight in stature but huge on personality, she does not waste a minute of her time.

The minute she starts the car she cracks the window. Why?

“I can listen to see if someone has loud music,” she said while turning at a red light and scanning license plate tags for expiration dates.

She said the color of the tag tells her the year, and if she can get close enough to the car, she can read the month.

Peebles said she once caught a man AWOL from the military off an expired tag.

“It is not just about writing tickets,” she said. “Sometimes you can make people think more and have a better impact on people’s actions by letting them go.”

But, Peebles says she likes the job because you never know what is going to happen during your shift — you can have 10 hours of nothing, armed robbery or you can have someone get hit by a train.

“Ted Bundy was caught on a traffic violation,” Peebles points out. “You never know who you are going stop.”

Peebles said the most common violations she sees are people not wearing their seat belts and speeding, and the average officer probably writes eight speeding citations in a shift. 

“If I acknowledge you, I see your brakes lights come on and I know you are acknowledging me, that is usually good enough for me,” she said.

“But if you are going 50 in a 35 or 48 in a 35 like this guy,” she said pulling the car into a tight U-Turn and driving after a white Tahoe, “I am going to pull you over. That is 13 over.”

Peebles said she sees so many people speeding she sometimes wants to pull over the one person not speeding and thank them.

“Every once in a while you get that person who cusses you out, but for the most part, people usually realize they deserve it and they end up thanking you for a ticket,” she said.

When the clock hits 15:05, her trademark grin makes an appearance.

“It is fixing to get fun, schools out,” she said while driving toward Baldwin County High School. “Wait until you see how they drive. They are crazy drivers. Well, not all of them are.”

Before the cruiser reaches the entrance to BCHS, her radar clocks a black Taurus doing 51 in a 35-mile-per-hour school zone.

After finishing that stop, she clocks a white Chevy Tahoe doing 65 in a 35.

“You think I’m going to let someone like that go,” she said. “What is he thinking? People don’t realize they are going to kill someone’s kid.”

That driver tells Peebles she could not figure out why she was being pulled over and claims she did not know it was a school zone.

“I have to write her a ticket, because that is just dangerous,” Peebles said. “I could cite her for reckless driving, but I am not.”

Peebles said some states double the fines for speeding in a school zone and throw the driver in jail for reckless driving.

“If we wanted to be mean, we could just sit in Courthouse Square and run radar,” Peebles said. “The speed limit there is 20, but people don’t do that.”

Peebles said the school zones have to be patrolled every day, or people will do whatever speed they want in them.

Almost before she finishes that sentence, she clocks another SUV doing 63 in a 45. The SUV gets a head start, but a U-Turn and press on the accelerator later, Peebles is in pursuit.

“Trying to sneak away from us that one,” she jokes while flipping on her lights.

Using her e-ticket computer system, Peebles pulls up the driver’s record to find a history of 15 tickets, two failure to appear notices and a license that has been suspended since October 2007.

“That driver should be off the road,” Peebles said. “You know what she told me. She told me she was from out of town and did not know the speed limit was not 55.”

With the two citations issued by Peebles, the driver totals 17 citations in an 11-year period.

“She is not getting this back,” Peebles said while sliding the driver’s license into a side-pocket in her cruiser. “And, she better be calling someone to come get her truck, or I’m going to have it towed. I’m not going to let her drive off. What if she kills somebody?

“Someone is going to say, ‘well Bay Minette let her go,’ and it is on me.”

In the end, Peebles is told to let her go, because she cannot tow her car and leave her on the side of the road.

“I told her I ain’t never seen a record like hers,” Peebles said.

Peebles said people try to use the ‘I didn’t know excuse’ all the time, but it is not her fault they are not paying attention to the visibly posted speed limit signs.

As for the most inventive excuse she has heard, she said she stopped a man doing 38 miles per hour over the speed limit who told her he was going to the hospital, because his wife was in labor and had just been induced.

“If she was just induced, she is not going to instantly have the baby,” Peebles said. “For that matter, the hospital is at most five minutes away from where I stopped him.”

She said she also clearly remembers a woman she stopped to give a warning to, but who got a ticket instead.

“When I first came to Bay Minette, I stopped a lady to ask her to slow down, and she started to yell that Bay Minette was just a speed trap and just to write the ticket,” Peebles said. “So, I wrote her the ticket. I had no intention of giving her one, but I did as she asked.”

Peebles has been on the Bay Minette Police force for more than two years. And don’t worry about her when she races by you in her Impala, she said she is the best driver from her academy class.

The above incidents took place in a two hour window.