BC, I get what your wife is saying. In the big scheme of things (for her), it was nothing. As a civilian/citizen, she is used to being asked for her license by a cop/warden and thinks nothing of it. To her, it is business as usual and no big deal. For some cops (or wardens), that's just how they roll. They did their "job" and can move on to the next person because that's what they deem important in their job.

I worked with quite a few people like that over the years--focus on something trivial and really work it so it looks like they are doing a great job and staying busy. They check little stuff like that but they miss so much more. And they never really KNOW the people in their beat.

Whenever I started working in a new area, I always got out of my car and actually talked to a lot of people. I handed out a huge amount of business cards and it paid off with big dividends. People would leave me a voice mail about some crime happening in my beat and would say how they wouldn't have thought about reporting it but I took the time to talk with them, answered their questions (that's huge in a citizen's world) and gave them a card to call me if they needed something or wanted to report something.

Plain and simple, I was a beat cop who knew most of the business owners and employees and knew a lot of the citizens who lived there. Most of them knew me or had heard of me and it often resulted in finding out problems in my beat that would have gone unreported and grown into something bigger because of it.

It's obviously old school and is disappearing from LE. It's unfortunate because it works so much better and it really is a better ROI on a citizen's investment in LE. They do pay our wages and benefits although some cops seem to forget that.