Odd Traffic Ventures

Man gets ticket. Man tries to pay ticket. Ticket does not show up on website. Man forgets ticket. Ticket does not forget man.
I work off of a truck. Each morning, I wake up around six and head down to a parking lot in Chelsea. I walk over to a decently sized Mitsubishi Fuso painted a lurid shade of lime green and wait for my partner. Together, we drive around four of the five boroughs and relieve people of their unwanted junk, a service for which they are exorbitantly overcharged and we are grossly underpaid. Often, our labors require us to pass over bridges and through tunnels, and our glorious nation's current security culture means that the police often wave us into security checkpoints. (Not as often as truckers who happen to have light brown skin though).
Usually, our conversations with police officers on these occasions are practically scripted.

"What's in the truck?"
"Just junk. Furniture and shi - I mean stuff."
"Open the back."
"OK."
"And your license and registration please."
"Here you go."
(five minutes pass, we strategize the rest of our day and bitch about our bosses while the cops watch porn in their car, pretending a license check takes five full minutes)
"OK. You can go on."
"Thanks."

Imagine my surprise when this insipid script suddenly went off the rails.

"Are you aware you're driving with a suspended license?"
"...No. Why is it suspended?"
"Unpaid ticket in Brooklyn."
"...What?"
"Get out of the car. You're being arrested."

Cops, incidentally, do not read you your rights. They have guns. You don't. That's the extent of your rights, as far as I can tell after being arrested twice.
Apparently, if you are driving with a suspended license, the police are under an obligation to arrest you. In full view of everyone on 35th street at rush hour, a policeman pulled me off of my truck and put me in handcuffs. ("Are those really necessary, officer?" "Yes they are, you're being arrested.") I spent the next four hours in jail while the police ran my prints on a computer that looked like it was from the 80's.
While in the cell, I thought a lot. It was not the first time I'd been in jail for a ridiculous offense, so I was pretty calm. I came up with many questions.
1) Why should a bureaucratic oversight lead to a morning in jail?
2) Why did this ticket only show up now, and not when I tried to pay it on the Traffic Violation Bureau's website?
3) Who was in this cell before me, and why did he draw centaurs all over the walls?
and
4) When will someone come to take care of the man in the next cell, who has bad gas and is complaining of severe chest pains and clamminess (heart attack, in other words).
The police were nice to me once I was in custody, and I had to fight the urge to think of them kindly. It's something that happens a lot to people who've been arrested. They forget that the man who is now concerned for your safety ("Watch your head," or"I'm gonna hold your arm so you don't fall," or "Are you thirsty? Hungry?") put you in handcuffs and is looking to keep you away from freedom for as long as he can. Or she. (When did the NYPD start hiring remotely attractive females?)
Instead, I tried to figure out the logic behind spending money, paper, and manpower on putting people like me - non-violent, unaware violators of a law or sanction they didn't know existed - in jail for 4 - 48 hours.
I couldn't.
My court date is on August 20th. I have been to the DMV, which was not half as painful as expected thanks to my girlfriend who played chess with me while waiting and the unexpected speed with which the civil servants there addressed my concerns, and my license has been restored.
But after my court date, I plan to focus my energies on what happened to me. Why was I arrested? Why are the police required to arrest people like me? What does our culture's obsession with jailing mean?
By circumstance, I find myself increasingly interested in what's happening with our security and imprisonment cultures.