I have a friend who graduated last year, who some of you readers might even know. Her name is Erin Signor. She has long blonde hair and big blue eyes. She is friendly, outspoken, very candid and extremely personable. She has two cats, two jobs and a live-in boyfriend. And last Monday, she was in a car accident. Now in addition to all her wonderful qualities she has some fractured ribs, a sprained ankle, multiple abrasions and lacerations and a broken elbow, clavicle and jaw.

The point of this article is not to warn you to wear your seat belt (although you should, and the reasonable motives for people who don’t are sparse). After being ejected from her vehicle and being rushed via ambulance to the emergency room, still gushing blood and waiting to go into a six-hour surgery, a cop investigating the accident appeared and personally handed her three tickets. This behavior was not only unprofessional, it was frankly appalling.

I am not opposed to Erin actually receiving the tickets. She ran straight into a parked construction truck (however, there is suspicion that proper signs were lacking). Tickets for speeding, obstructing a construction zone and not wearing a seat belt may be in order. I can see how not giving tickets because of injury could be considered hypocritical, but in such serious cases, I suspect the accident, rather than the ticket, is the deterrent from risky behavior.

Going into the ER to deliver the ticket personally seems like a huge breach of protocol, although I admit I don’t know that much about accident protocol. I think that if mailing tickets to severely injured patients isn’t the standard practice, it certainly should be. What kind of courteous, citizen-concerned officer of the law would want to cause more stress for someone about to go under the knife?

The shock of being propelled out of your car through the driver’s seat window and shattering your elbow is enough to make the most level-headed person a semi-conscious mess. It’s doubtful someone with only half of Erin’s injuries would have been in a condition to converse with an officer or even understand the purpose of the papers being shoved into her hand; the ‘signature’ she signed on her consent to surgery form was only a scribble.

I suppose it’s possible that the officer was really just dedicated to doing his job right. Perhaps he has a habit of always hand-delivering his tickets to accident victims rather than handing them to tearing relatives or taking the time to send them to the address on a driver’s license. But accidents are called accidents for a reason. This was not a serial killer or drunk driver, or any other plague of society that one could argue ‘deserved’ such treatment.

The officer who felt compelled to go to the emergency room to deliver tickets to a scared, bleeding 22-year-old girl ought to be ashamed of himself. Or perhaps the officer I’m deriding was only following the rules and the whole system is at fault.

Regardless, when function replaces compassion in our society, we’re in real trouble.

And I give the police officer the benefit of the doubt by using the word ‘function’ and not ‘malice,’ by the way.