I was a potential juror on Tuesday (yes, election day). I sat in a courtroom with 80 other potential jurors and listened to the attorneys question the selected dozen.
One question was asked of everyone: “Have you ever had any encounters with law enforcement?” About half the folks shook their heads, and the other half said, “You know, a speeding ticket.”
And I was thinking about how I’d have to answer that question:
When I was sixteen, I volunteered to be arrested as part of a nonviolent civil disobedience action.
When I was eighteen, I had a paycheck stolen and filed a police report.
It happened again when I was 22.
A speeding ticket.
Called 911 twice, each time because I was worried for someone’s safety (saw a man wrestle a woman to the ground by the side of the road, and saw my neighbor’s bedroom window shatter outward at 10:30 at night).
Various other minor encounters (cops approaching me and my friends on my mom’s land, thinking we were stoned trespassers; cops stopping my car while a friend drove it because she hadn’t turned the lights on; cop pulling me over because of a broken taillight after Helene, and surely others that I’m forgetting).
And I was like, are all the rest of them just lying because it’s embarrassing? or do I lead a life of villainy and shenanigans, where I have way more law enforcement encounters than other people?
Curious both about your personal experiences, and your perception of people in general.
Two traffic tickets (speeding and illegal U-turn).
Got caught smoking weed in a park after hours. They told me they were going to arrest me but they ended up giving me a ticket for littering (I had a can of beer that was left on a picnic table when they escorted me to the police car. If they hadn’t rousted us I would have tossed it in a trash can)
Called for a civil dispute when my landlord blocked the driveway on the day I was moving out. My landlord and I had been arguing for weeks and he decided to get in one last dig before I left. He did not appreciate having the cops banging on his door and telling him to move his truck.
I’ve been driving 50+ years. As best I recall I’ve had several many stops for speeding, one for expired license plate, and one illegal left turn. All stops deserved and all handled professionally. Plus dealt with police following 4 non-injury traffic accidents. Two of which were at least arguably my fault, and two definitely not. Same story: low key and professional on all sides. Had a couple of occasions where I outran / outmaneuvered a solo highway patrolman following them observing me speeding. I have no doubt those would have ended less professionally had my escape failed. Ahh, the exuberance of youth.
My non-driving related encounters …
As a teen one night I was pulled over for no apparent reason and our (me + pal) car was immediately surrounded by several keyed-up cops while a helicopter suddenly illuminated our scene. Good thing it was on an older residential street w heavy tree cover and no effective streetlights. Holy shit Batman! What’s up?
We gingerly handed over our IDs and after a few tense minutes everything and everyone calmed down. I asked what’s up and it turned out we had stopped to look at a nearby business storefront. Which unbeknownst to us had been severely vandalized the night before by several people driving a car similar to ours. A passing cop happened to see us stopped there and figured we were the perps having returned to admire our handiwork. So they gathered their reinforcements and after we drove off they stopped us a few minutes and a mile away.
Nope, not us. But an understandable mistake. Just glad it didn’t end up w either of us shot full of holes. Which seemed a distinct possibility for awhile there.
I witnessed a burglary once and flagged down the responding cop to provide a description of their getaway. He curtly took my info and sped off.
My garage was burglarized and I reported that. The responding officer was pleasant but all business.
Same story but this time somebody’d burgled my truck parked at my business.
As condo prez I called the cops on loitering trespassers a few times. Usually homeless guys seeking a shady place to sleep and that always went smoothly. The multiple responding cops asked them nicely to move along and they reluctantly did so. Cops also offered to give them a lift to the local shelter / soup kitchen if desired. They all declined.
Had one harder case as condo prez. A clearly drug-crazed dude who also looked homeless showed up on property shouting and gesticulating at all and sundry. Word salad mostly, but kept repeating his name, or the words he thought were his name. We called cops & paramedics while I went out to herd our people inside & keep an eye on this guy. Paramedics got here first, took one look / listen, and said to themselves that this patient needs cops more than medics, then stood there with their gear a good 100 feet from this wildman who was slowly becoming more agitated.
Cops showed up a couple minutes later, one sergeant and two regular officers. Surrounded him and talked w him as best they could. Eventually the sergeant and I did the requisite legal trespassing kabuki where they’d then be authorized to arrest him if he didn’t comply w my request to leave. His mind was in no condition to do anything so sensible. After a few more minutes of useless jawjaw, they tackled the guy onto the grass and once cuffed and shackled managed to half-carry the poor writhing dude into the paramedic wagon where he was strapped to a gurney. In all that could’ve been a lot more violent on either side. Turns out this guy was another frequent flyer known to the officers.
Oh yeah. Had a couple passengers arrested on arrival for some ill-considered passengering shenanigans. Mostly booze-induced. My advice: do not fuck w big airport policemen. They look kinda spoiled and lazy with that cushy indoor beat, but they can be turn real hostile real quick when provoked. They’re not mall cops by any stretch.
The usual meaning of this question when asked by attorneys in this situation is “encounter where you were accused of being a possible offender of a crime”, thus excluding traffic offenses, where you were a victim of a crime, where you were a possible witness to a crime, or ordinary human interactions.
In my case, I wasn’t “lying”, I just felt it wasn’t worth mentioning traffic tickets or anything other than a criminal encounter. I think most people feel that way. To me, a “lie” would be to say no in a case where you were brought in and questioned about a crime or some person you know who is suspected of a crime, or because you actually violated the law yourself.
Sorta. For sure cases like this one qualify: once on jury duty one poor guy said: “Yeah, I was arrested for an armed robbery I’d just done.”
And unlike the OP, the last time I got the “Your police encounters?” question, the judge clarified that routine traffic stops not ending in your arrest don’t count for today’s question.
But there’s also the lesser cases of having dealt with or observed cops behaving unprofessionally where you’d now more inclined to dislike / distrust law enforcement as a general matter.
A similar voir dire question I’ve heard is “Would you be inclined to weight a LEO’s testimony more heavily than a civilian’s?” Which goes directly to whether you think the police are generally scoundrels or reliable public servants. Your personal history of lesser encounters than your own questioning or arrest would sure go towards your answer to that question.
I never got that far in jury selection - but if I had, I’m 99% sure I would have asked “Exactly what do you mean by ‘law enforcement encounter’ ?” Because I’m that person and I can’t even come close to counting how many I had if we’re going to count calling 911 and my contacts with the other peace officers at my job.
I’m pretty sure by that question they don’t mean literally every encounter you have with a law enforcement officer including the time you chaperoned the scouts on a visit to the police station. They mean questioned as a possible perpetrator or arrested. I suppose it might include a traffic ticket, but even so, lots of people have never gotten a traffic ticket.
One time, I went to a wrong house (I was going to an AIrBnB) at night and cops showed up because someone thought I was a potential intruder. I never entered the house, I was just standing there waiting at the door, on the porch. After I explained things, the cops left.
The only one of those that I think would count as an interaction with the police would be your arrest at 16 and you can probably say no since the record for that one was presumably expunged at your 18th birthday?
A few, all minor. I’ll start with the oddest and most frustrating.
I got pulled over for cutting someone off. I was in the right lane, and needed to be in the left for an upcoming left turn. ETA: I’m including this traffic stop, because it was an ACAB moment, that definitely affects how I think of my local cops.
The car next to me was pacing me, so I slowed down to get behind it. There was a cop (I didn’t realize it was a cop at the time) behind that guy. The cop sped up to close the gap so I could not move over. So I sped up even more and got ahead of the first guy, then moved over, and into the left turn lane.
I thought I was getting pulled over for (briefly) going 55 in a 40, but he was upset that the guy I moved in front of had to slam on his brakes.
Review of the dashcam showed that there was plenty of room when I did get over, the guy I got in front of didn’t show any front end dive or something that would have happened if they slammed on the brakes. Additionally, it showed that the cop was the aggressive one, and deliberately sped up to block me moving over when I slowed down with my signal on.
There was a car behind me, so I didn’t want to slow too much, but if I’d realized it was a cop being a jerk, I’d have just slowed even more, or just take the next turn.
So, the whole thing was a cop got butthurt because he was being a jerk in traffic, and I foiled him.
A police car stopped and was talking to my kid and a friend down the street. Cops knocked on my door to ask if that was my kid.
This was when my kid was in 4th grade, so around 10, and happened in October or November.
Someone called the cops because they saw some kids outside without jackets.
Cops were very concerned that it was after dark. I explained it was not yet 5:30pm, and the kids were walking a whole suburban block from my house to the other kid’s house, “I don’t know the address” (because I’m not a snitch for stupid shit).
Super observant cops never even noticed one of the kids was barefoot (not mine) and the other was wearing sandals (mine).
It was cold out, and neither kid had jackets because autism, or just pre-teen obstinance. They were not going far, and it was not cold enough for frostbite or anything like that.
Useful encounter:
Someone drove through the light pole in my front yard, knocking down my neighbor’s mailbox, the street light, and taking out their radiator and oil pan. They also killed a snake.
Police, fire department, and the electric company all responded. The cops took pictures of the scene, and one of them even followed the trail of coolant and oil until it ran out on the main road, but never found the culprit. How far can a Nissan Titan/Armada drive without oil?
The cops were nice, but I never did get a resolution. None of the substantial damage was to my property, so I wasn’t an interested party.
And that’s the story of how the streetlight in front of my house was the first in the neighborhood to switch to LED.
It’s not that I don’t want to do my civic duty but no defense lawyer is going to let a cop on his jury so why are you wasting my time sitting there all day?
When I got the questionnaire for federal court one of the first questions is whether I worked in law enforcement. Yes. End of questioning
I’ve been in a couple of unremarkable traffic stops.
One time I called 911 because I was driving home and saw a man face down in the gutter, so I stopped and tried to help him but he was non responsive; I called 911, he started to wake up, a cop and an ambulance came, but I didn’t really deal with police much during that incident.
Finally, my daughter when she first came home from the hospital had an episode where she stopped breathing. I gave her CPR while we called 911; the first people on the scene were police, by then she was breathing thanks to the CPR so they mostly just took her vitals and waited with us for an ambulance to take her to the hospital. She ended up having a week long NICU stay before going home again.
While we were in the NICU the officer who was first on the scene came by the house to drop off groceries that he had bought for us and check in on us. It was a very kind gesture during a very scary time.
Not quite the same thing but my late wife was for many years a practicing attorney, albeit not of criminal law.
She once got a jury duty summons and fully expected to skate based on answering their “What’s your occupation?” questionnaire. Nope; no skating for her and she was called in for jury duty one fine day.
And made it through voir dire and was empaneled to hear a motor vehicle accident liability case. Not huge, but a wrecked car and a bunch of OOP medical expenses. No lifelong injuries or deaths. Took a couple days to hear & render a verdict.
I had jury duty last month and made it into the voir dire part where the trial judge told us that she herself had recently been called and had to serve jury duty a few weeks prior.
I was mugged once (no violence), reported it, and two nice officers took my report in person. The next day I went down and tried to find the perps (sorry, too much TV) in the mug books. I actually found one of them, but I wasn’t 100% positive, which they said was necessary for them to arrest him. This was around 1980. Nothing other than that, except traffic stuff.