Cops have never seemed to like me like at all... Even as a teenager they always assumed I was trying to be passive aggressive with them whenever I'd encounter them. Even though I was trying to be polite as possible in order not to be forced to the ground and potentially beaten.
Probably because of the alternative type style I had and probably because they were pieces of shit pigs on a power trip.
Jesus Christ that is scary. Sorry you had to go through that fiend.
I do know the next door in the suburbs I live in is full of Karen's doing exactly what described. The paper guy drives an older model working class van to deliver our cities paper every morning and Karen's have next doord him as well. Asking if people "know who drives the beat up old van around every morning"
I was pulled over for a random breath test once and they made me do the test like 10 times because it kept coming back with 0 alcohol and they wanted to get a positive with me for some reason.
Like they just assumed I had to be drunk even though there was zero reason to assume I was. Eventually, they let me go but they were weird and snarky about it the whole time.
I still to this day have no idea why they were so insistant. Maybe it was because my car is beat up and I look poor? I have no idea.
The last part rings true with me and the just general feeling that they think I'm trash and the snarkiness.
The beat up car thing and the looking poor thing is the same thing with me, every damn time.
uhhhh when i was a teen i had a cop threaten to ventilate my skull while he was arresting me bc i was being kind of a sassy little shit about it
Don't have one personally, but my friend got arrested for doing drugs a few years (when she was like 15/16). She spit at the cop, so he threw her on the ground, slammed her head on the concrete and called her life worthless, said he'd kill her if he could. Wonder how different that would've gone if she were white
Was driving to fast in a car with no speedometer on the freeway. Got pulled over. Cop came in pissed flashlight in my face, pointing at cans on the floor screaming that's a beer!! No beer wasn't drinking. Pulled me out breathalyzed me, nothing. Punched me in the face, yelled your free to go and left. He was a local cop and honestly I was planning retaliation, but thought better of it.
As a white man :grillman: who is also a recluse I've never really been harassed by cops, but I do remember the time I went to a concert in a really rough neighborhood and I had to walk a mile or two to get back to the lot where I parked, and cops slowed down and rolled down the window to inform me this was a rough neighborhood and suggest I get an Uber, to which I replied that I had no money, and I started to ask if they could give a ride a mile down the road if they were so concerned for my safety but they had already rolled up the window and started driving away lol
Protect and serve
(I made it to my car fine by minding my own business and staying in well-lit areas)
Nothing crazy, but I had an unmarked cop zoom ahead and sit behind me and to the left one lane because I turned my blinker on. And then matched my speed for close to a mile as I tried to get into one of the many left hand turn lanes to turn around.
After like a mile of turning my blinker on and off again I turned it back on and switched lanes in front of him, about 40 or 50 feet in front of him, you know uncomfortably close but really slowly so as to make it safe. He turned on his lights and came out of his car spitting and going apeshit that I "cut him off" and that I should have "just gone to the next turn lane if I didn't have the space" even though I literally passed up like 5 of them. Unsafe lane change is not a cheap ticket
EDIT: OOH I didn't think of this because it wasn't a police "encounter", but this is the actual worst one:
I went to hang out with a dude in Phoenix Arizona and it turned out his dad was one of Joe Arpaio's boys, and he was DEFINITELY one of the 40% by the way. So anyway at like 6:00 at night he comes home in his uniform and opens the front door, doesn't acknowledge his kids in any way just walks the other way toward his bedroom, and I can hear him literally muttering the N-word to himself.
Cw: sv
spoiler
Sexually assaulted when my therapist called the cops on me for being depressed
They impounded my car and vandalized the shit out of it because the magic nazi dog sat down. Then I learned what qualified immunity was.
1: Got pulled over for driving at night without my headlights on (which was fair, that was unobservant of me) and one of the two cops asked (in a leading way) if I had a mental disability. Ultimately they let me go without even a ticket so I guess it wasn’t that bad, but it was still weird. I wonder if they were trying to rile me up.
2: this one isn’t really my encounter, but when I was in college I was walking across campus at night after working out at the gym, and saw two campus cops confronting (and I think grabbing) a black guy. They left him alone and walked off somewhere else once I was within about 100ft of them, so I didn’t really see what happened, but the black guy was clearly very annoyed by whatever just happened. I talked to him and he said he was an employee at the dining hall and had just got off work and was waiting for his ride (being picked up by his girlfriend) when the cops came up and started accusing him of, I don’t even know, loitering I guess? And they didn’t believe him when he told them he was employed at the dining hall. (To be honest, I didn’t recognize him from the dining hall either, but I don’t think he was lying about that.) His girlfriend had arrived in her car right when the confrontation with the cops was at its peak, so she got kinda spooked and drove off without him, so now he had to call her and explain what happened and wait for her to get there all over again.
The first was the worst.
For those old enough to remember the Battle of Seattle in 1999, you can figure out what that did to the worldview of an idealistic liberal teenager. :doomer:
I’ve told this story here before: in my lib days I was elected to a county-level public office. I was the only one on a committee (of evenly divided republicans and democrats) to vote against funding the police. The sheriff was three feet away from me and he just completely lost it and was screaming in my face. None of the other committee members backed me up or would even talk to me. I was so shocked I could barely speak. (Earlier I had politely asked if he was working with ICE; he told everyone that he was, and yet another shocked silence descended upon the room, since I guess even the republicans know that ICE is the gestapo.) I resigned after covid because they wanted to keep meeting in person and I wasn’t willing to risk my family to stick it to the pigs when I had zero community support. I was legitimately concerned that the police or their friends would kill us. This is why I’m extremely annoyed when, come election time, people say we need to vote for local democrats because they somehow aren’t as bad as state or federal democrats, even though all three groups worship the police and keep giving them unlimited money to murder people. In bourgeois elections it’s only okay to support blatantly communist political parties.
