When you win a Super Bowl, you can call in old favors from friends on the state police force to impress the members of your exclusive driving clubs. All at the risk of tax-paying citizens of the state that is the technical home to your old football team.

These are the rules. Taxpayers pay players to win Super Bowls so players can drive their cars as fast and as recklessly as they want on taxpayer highways.

Back in March, Brandon Jacobs (sometimes-member of the Driving Force Club and fresh off the New York Giants’ Super Bowl victory) likely contacted his old buddy, Sergeant Nadir Nassry of the New Jersey State Police, to inquire about the possibility of a police escort for the members of The Driving Force Club on the Garden State Parkway on a jaunt down to Atlantic City.

(The Club is for “all car fanatics with a spice of racing and adrenaline rush in their hearts.”)

This mantra then played out in real life. Jacobs and thirty high-performance vehicles were led down the Parkway by Sergeant Nassry and Trooper Joseph Ventrella where, according to witnesses on the highway, the exotic cavalcade of thirty sped and changed lanes rapidly. One of the witnesses referred to the spectacle as “Death Race 2012.”

Citizens lodged complaints about Death Race 2012, and now the New Jersey Attorney General announced criminal charges against the troopers. The most serious of these stems from the claim that Sergeant Nassry advised participants to cover their license plates with black electric tape to avoid detection.

The electrical tape charge – one of many – carries a prison sentence of three to five years.

Yeah, it’s safer to have a police escort for thirty cars on a crowded highway if those thirty cars were going to speed and drive recklessly anyway without the escort. And I get the awe factor that these things bring to people merely watching. But that’s not the point. The Driving Force is not  – not even close – the Hell’s Angels. It’s a niche club of rich guys who like to drive fast that benefitted from the friendship ties of a Super Bowl Winner.

Hunter S. Thompson would not write about these folks. The troopers should have used more discretion.

And the really crazy part about this? Brandon Jacobs signed with the San Francisco 49ers two days before this ride took place.

All it is is police trying to be cool.