by Justice William W. Bedsworth

Anyone who has ever observed my behavior when a pink bakery box appears in my vicinity knows I have some addictive personality traits. And robust salivary glands.

Those people will not be surprised to learn that during the pandemic’s early stages I became addicted to European television. I’m still watching it.

European mysteries are wonderful. They often stretch out for six hours or more. They devote entire seasons to one murder.¹ That’s plenty of time for character development.

Also false leads. In six hours, you can throw out red herrings, blue herrings, aquamarine halibut, all manner of deceptions. They have time to take you down the garden path, leap across to a different garden altogether, come back up the garden path and start down another. By the time they’re done, you’ve mistakenly identified the perpetrator six times, at least one of your putative perps has himself been killed, and you’ve seen every garden in Great Britain.

Or France. Or Norway. Or Germany. Or Sweden. Or Iceland! We actually watched a couple of Icelandic detective shows. They were a little dark for my taste² but, in fairness, there are so few firearm murders in Europe that they have to come up with a lot of bizarre methods of killing.

Victims are drowned in wine vats, thrown into machinery, tossed out of windows, or unknowingly employ poisoned violin resin in their performance of the concerto.³ When you’ve been raised on gun violence, these poisonings, drownings, stranglings, and defenestrations seem both exotic and . . . well, heartless. Dark.

But what always stands out to me is just how different law enforcement is in other countries. Especially Great Britain. A Scottish police officer creeps into a darkened house where he expects to encounter a serial murderer UNARMED. I wouldn’t do this with anything less than three knives and a bazooka, but the Brits do it all the time.

They go chasing after the bad guys, knowing that when they catch them, they’re going to have to win a fist fight—or worse—to accomplish the arrest. They can’t just pull out their sidearm and yell “Stop.”

And since they’re always detectives in these shows, they’re gonna wrestle around with this miscreant in a suit. In the mud.⁴ I can understand how they solve the mysteries, but I’m completely baffled by their ability to pay their cleaning bills.

I’m also impressed by the civilized deportment of all involved in these shows. When the bad guys tell the cops to take a hike, they almost always do so with an urbane discourse about their unwillingness to go forward without their solicitor. Or they declare, “If I’m not under arrest, I’ll be leaving now; I have another appointment, and it would be rude to keep them waiting.”

And the good guys take this with good grace. When asked to leave a suspect’s house, they leave. When a suspect gives them one of the aforementioned hyper-refined versions of “Go to hell,” they somehow manage to shrug it off and move on to solving the mystery.

That’s a pleasant world in which to live for a few hours each evening. It’s certainly more satisfying than watching my athletic teams, which has become the entertainment equivalent of playing solitaire with a fifty-one-card deck.

I don’t for a minute assume it’s an especially realistic world. It’s mostly the English telly that’s so polite. The French and the Germans aren’t nearly as nice to each other as the Brits.⁵ And those Scandinavians are forever cutting off the body parts of their victims and making me look at them; no amount of politeness can make up for that.

But I really don’t know what the real world is like in Europe. Like most Americans, I tend to make the mistake of thinking Europeans are just like us—only they talk funny.

They’re not. It’s like comparing last month’s Keeneland yearlings to the Budweiser Clydesdales: there’s an undeniable identity but they’re astonishingly different.

Exhibit A: The Germans are suffering through a “cultural crisis”⁶ because some of their trains are arriving late. We have a train we can’t even run between San Clemente and San Diego because the tracks keep falling into the ocean. Cue collective yawn.

Scotland’s University of the Highlands has put a warning label on Ernest Hemingway’s masterpiece novella The Old Man and the Sea, alerting readers to the fact that in reading it they are going to encounter “graphic fishing scenes.” Graphic fishing scenes. This is a university. And they’re afraid it might be too disturbing for their readers to contemplate what happens when fish are caught.⁷

Then there is the Norwegian town of Longyearben, which has had to make burials illegal. It’s too cold for the bodies to decompose, and the permafrost sometimes pushes them up out of the ground. This was considered a minor nuisance until scientists discovered they could extract samples of the 1918 Spanish flu from some of the older corpses. So now—and so help me, I’m not making this up—“Residents who are elderly or terminal must relocate to the mainland.”^8<./sup>

But my absolute favorite they’re-not-like-us story is about Finland. I knew the Finns were smarter than we are. They’re electronic geniuses. They make phones that can mow your lawn and cook your dinner. AND they’re smart enough not to let their society use those phones in such a way as to destroy itself with social media.

That’s enough for me to rest my case, but here’s the ne plus ultra. Here’s what makes me stand and applaud the Finns: traffic tickets. The Finns have the best solution for dangerous drivers I’ve ever heard.

True story. Finnish businessman named Anders Wiklof picked up a ticket for driving 50 mph in a 30 mph zone. What do you think his fine was? Go ahead, do the math in your head. Think about what punishment you think appropriate for that infraction.⁹ You got a number?
How about $129,000?
Yep. Fifty in a thirty and he paid 129K.
You wanna know why? Because he’s rich.

Finland indexes its penalties to the driver’s income and driving record. Mr. Wiklof is apparently very successful. So we can’t slow him down with a fine that might cause you or me to decelerate. Fining him $250 . . . or $1,000 . . . or $50,000 would not be a deterrent.

How do we know that? Because he’s previously paid speeding fines of $68,000 and $102,000. So this time . . . $129,000. Sooner or later, we’ll hit the number that has the desired deterrent effect. In the meantime, we’ll fund some schools.

Now THAT’S law enforcement.

And what’s the response of the man who’s paid $300,000 for three traffic tickets? Mr. Wiklof says, “I really regret the matter.” Exactly the kind of thing the bad guy in my European mysteries says when he’s wiped out an entire tour bus by rigging the exhaust to flow back into the vehicle through a filter saturated with a little-known deadly extract from the Alpine hyacinth flower.

Clydesdales. These people are Clydesdales.

BEDS NOTES

1. Although one of the more popular British mystery series, set in what was supposed to be an area of peaceful villages, managed to cram three-to-five killings into ninety minutes in every episode. We couldn’t figure out how this sparsely populated area could still have people left to kill.
2. Scandinavians seem to be drawn to particularly gruesome murders. There was one we watched that was so disturbing I had to follow it with a House Hunters episode before going to bed each night.
3. Honest; just watched that one last night.
4. I’ve learned it rains a lot in Europe. These shows are very educational.
5. This may be because they have firearms. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a cop in Paris standing casually on a street corner with a submachine gun.
6. Their term.
7. This strikes me as a little too civilized. I think they may have sharpened that particular pencil to too fine a point.
8. Los Angeles Times, Sunday, August 20, 2023. I expect this to show up in a plot of one of my Norwegian mysteries soon.
9. I ran this past two judges. One said $50, one said $175. My own number was $250. Be glad I don’t hear traffic cases.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.