I’ve actually never had a bad encounter with the police. I’ve been pulled over for traffic violations a few times, but the worst that ever happened was that a cop suggested very pointedly that it would be cheaper to just renew my registration than to have to pay the ticket for it being expired.
I’m white and female, for what that’s worth.
I got pulled over because my cars rear lights were out (it was 10pm), and the guy asks me “Do you know why I pulled you over?”, I said no, then he told me about the lights, and asks for the standard license/registration. Leaves to check the information in his car, comes back and asks what I am sitting on, and here is the deal. I totaled my last car, but I loved the thing, and my current car had old leather seats, and the leather was shredded, so I cut out the airbags from my old car, and put them over the seat in the new car. And apparently in my city there is a black market for airbags, so people break into cars and rip out he airbags (undetonated) and sell them. So he suspected I was involved in that, made me get out of the car, got strip searched, and searched my car. In the end since he found nothing wrong, he explained why he had to search the car. Not a bad experience but I can’t say I appreciated being at the corner of a busy road getting strip searched and my car searched by cops 
San Diego, 1978, about 7 pm. Across the street from the Sports Arena where the Bee Gees are performing that night. A buddy and I hear a bunch of chanting and yelling and decide to go see whats happening. A bunch of people are promoting the “Disco Sucks” movement that was popular at the time. Even though we were standing off to the side, we were rounded up with about 50 others and herded to a corner of the parking lot. Then we were loaded into a bus and taken downtown to the police station and given a ticket for trespassing with a $12 fine. We had to take a taxi back to the arena, my buddy’s car was parked across the street.
White woman, thirtysomething. Worst experience I’ve had was a couple of weeks ago; a police car tried to pass me on the right across a solid white line. I’d been waiting for the line to become dashed before I changed lanes so I could turn right at the next intersection–and I’d just come out of a roundabout in an unfamiliar area and was flustered. I almost changed lanes right into the police car–started to move the car over, then realized what was what and got back into my old lane.
After that he slowed down and stayed well back from me. So not a bad experience, just that he was doing illegal stuff while I was distracted and we almost wrecked.
So after that experience did you join the “Disco Sucks” side? 
I was driving along a 30 road that I’d seen speed traps on before so I was doing 29.5 mph. Yet I still got flagged over into a car park with about 20 police. One of them came over and explained that I had been speeding but they would rather not write me a ticket. Instead they would give me some speed awareness education after they had given my vehicle a quick safety check and confirmed my insurance and licence. It was clearly a bullshit excuse to pull lots of cars over and do random checks. Which aren’t entirely legal here in the uk. The police can only pull you over if they have probable cause. The fake speeding was their fake excuse.
I was there for a good 15 mins and they were pulling over about 1 in 3 cars. Once everything checked out I got my speeding education. An officer came over and said ‘don’t speed’. That was it.
The funny thing is that their safety check completely missed the failed brake light. I knew it was out and had a replacement ready, but I hadn’t had a dry day to fit it.
Personally I think random checks are a good idea and would catch a lot of uninsured drivers. But the law says they’re illegal and it annoys me that they were being under hand and ignoring that.
I had an MP sergeant shove his .45 in my gut for no reason at all. I was also an MP (private) and he was just fucking around.
One night around 11PM I was still up in the living room on the computer and hubs was asleep. I heard incoming up the stairs then banging on the front door. I ask “who is it” and the reply was MCSO. I open the door and about five deputies come in. They ask is Anya here? I state I do not know any Anya. They act like I am lying. They say Anya is my son’s girlfriend. My sons girlfriend is Ashton I tell them.
They ask to search the house. I tell them hubby is sleeping and notice they are already looking around. I go into the bedroom to tell hubby to get dressed as cops are searching the house.
We have an old armoire, military issue, in the bedroom that I keep padlocked with clothes, jewelry box, prescription meds etc due to my son being a thug. So they go into the bedroom and ask me to unlock the armoire. I said do you think I have someone in there. Do you have a warrant? I retrieved my keys and opened it to show there was no one hiding in there. Then they searched the downstairs enclosure and snooped around the cars.
I work for DOD and they then questioned the stickers on my car.
I wrote a letter to the Sheriff’s office expressing my displeasure and in hind site probably should not have let them in. I am almost certain this was and illegal search. I did notice on the sheriffs web page a few days later that Anya was found and I had never seen her before. If I had been hiding a person in a locked cabinet wouldn’t that be illegal?
I was flagged over at an RBT station a few years ago in the early hours of Easter Sunday morning on my way home from the Vigil. I hadn’t drunk anything, so there were no issues. But the policeman noticed that my car, a rental from Hertz, was not displaying a registration sticker. He tried to suggest that I was somehow at fault, until I told him to stop bring ridiculous.
I’ve never really had any bad experiences, but I did have one, many years ago, that was disappointing.
I’d had a man, a stranger, invade my home at night and assault me. I know it’s hard to find such a person, so that’s not the problem.
About three weeks after this I got a call from the police, in the evening. They wanted to come over right away they said, as they had some photos to show me. I was more than happy to look at pictures. They set out six photos and I pointed to one of them, recognizing my attacker. They seemed unhappy, brushed off my questions, and left.
The next day there was a picture in the paper, of a man accused of murder, and he looked like one of the other pictures I’d seen. I realized they were trying to pin other charges on the guy, and I never heard from them again about my photo ID.
baker. They never followed up with your attacker? Unbelievable.
I was #4 in what I think were six attacks.
About two or three days after my experience an article appeared in the paper warning women living within a certain area( my home included) that a serial attacker was on the loose.
My grandmother read the article and called me up to warn me to be careful. I said I would, and didn’t tell her. I’d rather keep it inside that upset her.
You had to strip naked at the corner of a busy road? Where exactly did they think you were stashing the air bags?
Thought of another incident that happened to my brother: he was carjacked at gunpoint in Alexandria, VA. He did a composite sketch with the police artist and the detective said, “it looks like every nigger I’ve very seen.” Protect and serve dude.
I’ve had several unpleasant experiences with the Kansas City Missouri police, which is especially annoying as my dad was a KCMO cop when I was a kid. These shitbags have changed someone who used to have a positive impression of the police to a negative one.
When I was 20, I got a ticket for jaywalking. To be precise, it was for crossing against a red light at 11th and Main. But the thing was, at that particular intersection, all the lights turned red at once, and all the walk signs lit up. It was perfectly legal to jaywalk there. Asshole wrote me a ticket anyway. I showed up at court to fight it, with photographs of the intersection, and the gutless wonder didn’t show up so I didn’t get to say my piece.
A couple of years later, I was walking down a street, a car backfired, and I got stopped by a cop who accused me of throwing firecrackers. Never mind that I didn’t have any fireworks on me, or a lighter and I hate fireworks. I got dragged to a police station miles away and waited an hour before they finally figured all this out. I was stuck more than a mile from a bus line and they would not give me a ride back to where I was picked up, citing some bullshit about “insurance”.
Years later, I was walking home, it was very late, and I tried to hail a cab who was pulling into a liquor store. I ran over to him, and the driver, seeing the liquor store was closed, pealed out, nearly running me over. He drove across the street to a convenience store. I ran over there to ask “What the hell?”, and he got out of the car and hauled off and punched me in the mouth. The people in the store called the cops, and detained the driver. I could not get the cops to arrest the driver, or even breathalyze him! They apparently thought it was important to keep a violent functional alcoholic behind the wheel of a cab.
Yet another time, I was going to see a movie on the Country Club Plaza, and the “Church” of Scientology had set a couple of card tables up in front of the theater to sell their books and run their scam. The had an e-Meter and all their crap. I called the police, and a pair of cops showed up. The Scientologists, as is their policy, lied to the police and claimed I had been screaming abuse. The cop threw me to the sidewalk, gave me a black eye, called a paddy wagon and I spent the night in a police lockup.
Finally, for the last two years, I have been trying to get the police to ticket this scummy business called “Basement Repair Supply” that has been parking cars, vans and pickup trucks on the sidewalk (see this Google streetview for evidence). Not once have they ticketed of towed these cars, and I suspect the asshole owner is a former Kansas City cop. I’m pretty sure this won’t change until he actually gets someone killed.
Houston police have a apparent policy of asking for ID as harassment, when doing such nefarious activities as walking down a sidewalk in the middle of the day or leaving a grocery store with bags in hand and walking across the lot to walk back to your apartment. Expect ridiculous threats when you say you don’t carry any, up to arrest and deportation. Expect nonsensical vague accusations, what are you doing buying groceries at 5pm? A little odd isn’t it sir. I’m probably not remembering the most nonsensical probing questions.
Basically any pedestrian in Houston is an excuse for a cop to stop their car and ask for your ID, I love the city honestly but no where else in the world have I been so harassed by cops! And aside from being young and male I do not stand out, short hair and normal dress.
(Looking back I suspect but have no proof they may have thought I was an illegal immigrant, I’m often mistaken for hispanic though I am not. It would also explain how when I started talking they would either break off or go into crazy threat mode.)
Being shot with a water cannon filled with purple dye, then narrowly avoiding being shot with buckshot (as in, it hit the guy next to me and he dropped. Not sure to this day how wounded he was, the cops took him) and a few minutes later being beaten with a sjambok until I bled…
I’ve never had a bad experience with the police, and I was even arrested once.
There’s no car parked on the sidewalk in that picture. Maybe that’s why they won’t ticket them? :dubious: (Where that car is parked alongside the building is not a sidewalk).
Why purple dye? Was it to break up a protest and mark the protesters?