Jeepers Stuffy, can’t say I blame you for not feeling too friendly toward the law. My dad was dragged in on suspicion of murder when he was passing through Texas a jillion years ago. Just the once left a pretty bad taste in his mouth.
Nope.
I got a ticket once for possession of not enough to charge me with anything serious, and in court, since it was my first offense, the charge against me was unconditionally dimissed.
I’ve always been absolutely sure that the one thing I never wanted to happen to me was to go to jail. So I’ve been meticulously careful about not causing that to happen.
Hey. You stole my topic idea. Heh.
I actually thought of making this topic about a week ago but thought it might be a bad idea. It was confirmed later by someone who I asked in e-mail.
Too bad the OP didn’t ask also. It was a bad idea.
Closed.
Once again, because some folks don’t read the rules:
your humble TubaDiva
Upon discussion with the staff, the consensus we’ve come to is this:
It’s your nickel, Sidney, and your butt in the sling for what you say, and we really shouldn’t try to save you from yourself.
If you regret what you do later, you’re going to have to bear up under whatever consequences that come from whatever source.
All emails asking to save your job, your marriage, your standing with your friends, your political career, etc., by removal of incriminating/compromising material you have placed here will be answered with a smile and “nope.”
So in that spirit, we will reopen these threads.
We still reserve the right to remove material that really does go too far, but your right to confession and TMI is largely unfettered.
Have fun.
your humble TubaDiva
Well, I have no shame. (Not much, anyhow…)
[repurposed from a previous writeup of the event] - Once I changed clothes before going out and forgot to transfer my wallet, and drove off without it. I was trying to find an obscurely marked driveway on a busy street, and shot by it twice. On the third pass, I spotted it directly in front of me and jammed on the brakes. The driver behind me did likewise, but the person behind him, caught off guard, collided with him. I pulled over and apologized for precipitating the incident, and was still talking with the two drivers when the police showed up. Since my car was not even involved in the accident, I didn’t figure on being in any trouble…until I came up empty-handed when asked for a driver’s license. Or some form of I.D. Oops…
I was arrested and patted down, and placed in the back of the patrol car. There is a steel cage in them which prevents prisoners from endangering the officers in the front seat. At the jail, a large electrically-operated gate slid open for a moment and the car was driven in. We entered the first door, and once that was relocked, I was again patted down. The arresting officers relayed information to the desk clerks, who typed it up. A second door was unlocked, and I was brought in to a room where a police officer took each hand in turn, rolled it across an ink pad, then rolled the print off each finger onto the fingerprint card. Then I was placed in front of a camera with a numbered chalk board under my chin and photographed head on and from the side.
They kept asking me to recite name, date of birth, and home address, and the make and model of my car (which I did, and kept volunteering my social security number, driver’s license number, telephone number, and cheerful promises that I wasn’t on the most wanted list or anything).
Eventually, their computer was going to burp and verify that a current driver’s license really had been issued in my name, and that I wasn’t wanted for anything, but the process took awhile; and meanwhile, they apparently couldn’t just take my word for it and translate it all into a ticket and send me home. I was asked if I could raise bail to get out, but, unfortunately, I had neither money nor collateral at that time. So…
I was taken to a shower stall, told to strip, and was squirted with this harsh-smelling jelly stuff (for lice, he told me) and stood under the (cold) water and rinsed off. I was handed a towel and a set of green jail clothes which looked sort of like what nurses and orderlies wear in the operating room of a hospital, those loose-fitting pullover drawstring things. From there I was led to a cell to spend the night.
The cell was a small ugly room with metal trays welded to the walls, on which lay mats about one inch thick. That was bed. My cell had four of them, two on a side. There was also a toilet. That was it, except for the bars and the door. Everything was metal except the bed mat, the concrete floor, and the blanket they furnished me. No pillow.
Fortunately, the paperwork finally cleared, and they wrote me out a ticket for driving without a license, and let me call someone to come pick me up and take me home. </repurposed writeup>
Several civil disobedience arrests, some of them almost hilariously pro forma — Police Officer: “OK, how you folks doing today? Good turnout? What’s the cause of the event? Oh, OK. All right here’s how it works. I’m going to come back and tell you all to disperse. If you don’t have ID on you, or if you don’t have a ride from the jail at XXth Street arranged, that’s when you leave. The rest of you, we’ll warn you again and then put plastic handcuffs on you and take you down. You’ll get booked and released, any questions before we get started?”
Arrested for criminal trespass for breaking into a public high school and distributing birth control and sex education information into lockers.
Arrested for possession of marijuana seeds and dirty/used marijuana pipes (officially); mostly they wanted me to get out of town.
The Serious One
In college with severe $ shortfall —some asshole smashed in all the windows on my decrepit old car and I could not afford to replace them. Bought a running junker to use; problem was, it had been in his wife’s name before divorce, he hadn’t turned in the title with her transfer sig on it to get a title in his own name to sign over to me, and the state inspection sticker had expired. So if I got stopped for expired inspecton sticker they’d find I didn’t have the car registered, and of course that also meant no insurance. So I went to the computer lab. This was middle-late 1980s and we had early Macs (the little black-and-white “toaster” type — SE models). Carefully drew up a replica of an inspection sticker using SuperPaint and printed it out on laser printer. The color that year was yellow so I colored in the relevant parts with a yellow highlighter, and taped it up inside my windshield. It all worked fine until one day a police officer didn’t like the way I changed lanes just as I came to a stoplight, and followed me into Taco Bell and hit the lights and siren after I was out of the car. See license and car reg. Oh, no car reg? Inspects car. Uh oh. Yep, I get cited for forgery :eek: and I’m off to jail, a nasty place in Riverhead, Long Island. In court I plea-bargain to possession of a forged instrument and get an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal based on no prior record, and after a year or so the charge is officially dropped. That one could’ve gone really bad, though. (Had to pay major fines for uninsured vehicle btw).
Not even nasty looking donuts/bug juice/ bologna sandwiches being offered to you by guards multiple times, no matter how much you hate the idea of eating sugar glaze without the ability to brush?
Wow that’s tiny. I once knew a guy who bought a gram for $30 (or 40?) and showed it to us; it wasn’t much at all. It was his first time too. He ended up doing the whole gram that night, but not before doing a line inside his car in front of us and just driving off. What a farking dumbass. :smack:
(He’s still alive, though. Also long time ago, and as far as I know it was his only time. He got ridiculed the hell over it too, by us and his girlfriend who was furious when she found out. Hey, changing subject…
I’m impressed.
I certainly hope it didn’t endanger your chances at gaining a distinguishing career in the military later on!
Ok, I so totally didn’t get this. It isn’t a crime to not carry ID in any state. Driving without ID is a crime but it’s usually a misdemeanor. When they asked you to provide bail, what were they going to charge you with?
Nope. Never. Not in all my 50 years. I know people whose jaws drop when I tell them this.
The closest I’ve gotten is being stopped twice for walking, once on Route 17 and once on the railroad tracks. The cops just told me to “move along.”
tremorviolet:
I don’t think they greatly cared, as long as they could hang something on long enough to justify detaining me. As soon as I had someone to bring my license and vouch for who I was, they lost interest in charging me with anything (even the ticket was incorrect and I subsequently beat it in court), but as long as they had someone of unconfirmed identity driving a car that might or might not be his own, and who might or might not be wanted for something, they were going to hold onto me.
I suspect the “bail question” was just another way of getting a handle on how to confirm my identity. On the other hand, if I’d started yelling that I wanted a lawyer and that they had no right to hold me without charging me with something, they probably would have complied and charged me with possession of a stolen automobile or grand auto theft or some such thing sufficient to keep me from simply walking out the door unidentified.
I had two cops come to my house for me when I was fifteen.
In the Netherlands, buscompanies sell a kind of “advance ticket”. You buy them at a post-office and stamp 'm on the bus. When the prices for these tickets were raised, they had to get rid of the old ones. Instead of putting them through the shredder, some office klutz at the post-office had put out loads and loads of these tickets with the old newspapers in a box on the street, to be collected with the old paper. That’s where I found them, and I collected as much as I could, to give them away. (I could travel on the bus myself for free at the time). Suspiciaon arose when a frined of mine used a ticket on the bus that could not have been bought in advance, and he told the cops he got it from me.
The cops asked me to come to the office later, and I did, but they seemed rather amused with the whole story and after a check-up that confirmed my story (no post-office had been held-up recently), they let it go.
I didn’t learn anything from it. 
Does being *interviewed *by the Police count? 
I’ve never actually been arrested. I have been “voluntarily detained” once or twice.
What I learned:
When spelunking in the NCSU steam tunnels: never open a strange door. You’ll trip a silent alarm.
Never, ever put out your hand when some one tells you, “Here, hold these.” Especially when that’s the Governor’s secretary walking up the capital steps. And absolutely under no circumstances when she knows your mother.
Overnight in the juvinile section in a SMALL New Mexico town for DUI and Attempting to Evade (on foot). I was 16.
Twelve hours for a DUI, and I may have to go back for 2-10 days.
If we could tell anonymously I would.
But we can’t.
So I won’t.
It’s one hell of a story though (nope, no one here’s ever heard it).
In general, State College, PA cops are very cool. I was warned several times to get off my bike and walk, considering my condition. Even on a bicycle, a DUI is a DUI, loss of drivers license, jail time and everything.
So no, never. I think I’d freak out from claustrophobia if I was ever handcuffed with my hands behind my back in a police car.
Hey lieu, didn’t your FRIEND get into a spot of trouble at one point?
Hmmm? 
-Tcat