Cops tick me off

ok last night I'm driving home from work and some idiot tailgates me. I'm on the beltline and there is a semi to my right and a nice hard wall to my left. I decide to speed up and pull over to let the out of state driver get by. So I do...right through a 6+ man hidden cop speed trap. They pull me over but the guy three inches from my rear gets away scot free. Then I find out there is "no excuse" as it is a heavy enforcement night. The officer was ready to let me go until he notices an interesting item hanging from my rear view mirror (I'm male, dominant, and into BDSM so let your mind wander). The cop uses that as a signal to check me for drugs, intoxication, and weapons. This is fine but when I entered the state I now reside in I moved shortly after 9-11 and got pulled over. I was theratened with jail time for 15 over cause I was from out of state, despite the fact I told the officer I was movign here, gave him the address I was moving to, and my car was overflowing with stuff I owned.

grrrr I hate cops.

Most of them are just doing their jobs. I'm surprised they were even able to get you doing that though, it sounds like there was alot of stuff happening which you'd imagine would make it hard for them to get a speed reading.
What kind of car do you drive?

For the future, try slowing down when some asshole tailgates you...if it's really bad. Not alot, just a bit under the speed limit. Or just go exactly the speed limit. Usually tailgating means "I'm a complete fucktard and I want to go 10-20+ mph over the speed limit, so screw anyone else's safety." So they get impatient quick. Unless traffic is insane usually they'll get pissed off and start swerving into another lane (or two) so they can get to their "oh so important" place they just HAVE to be.

If they happen to sideswipe someone as a result of their own stupidity and aggressive driving, I guess just try to hold in your laughter while you explain to the cops what you saw and why it happened.

I don't put anything that might be offensive to cops on my car. Hell, it is a constant struggle for me not to read end all the "W '04" cars I see daily. Cops are only human.

Instead, I paid $50 for a Fraternal Order of Police sticker that I display prominently on my car in two places.

I am generally a safe driver, but I have never been pulled over for a ticket even when speeding through a trap.

Ok let me clarify I had clamps hanging on my rearview mirror. Never thought that as offensive...except to the smiley face stress ball I used to hand by it.

Ah ha! Roach clips! Stoner!!

Tweezer style or alligator clamps? Because the average officer of the law might mistake the tweezer style for paraphenelia.

Not that I'd know anything about clamps....

Understandable. I just tend to make my car as bland as possible.

I make enough political statements elsewhere and I think high insurance premiums suck.

Neither type they were japanese clovers

Cops:
Here they are now having k-9 units stand by for all traffic stops. The pulling cop calls the k-9, the k-9 unit walks around your car, the doggie "woofs" or scratches the ground...now they have the right to search your vehicle (dog indication = cause for search). No drugs, go on your way.....
Otherwise, they ask you if you will submit to a vehicle search. You say Yes...they search and on and on. You say No, they automattically suspend your license for 90 days. Then they tow your car, and all vehicles entering the impound have to be searched prior to entry...so you get searched anyway....oh, and our great state legislature is mulling enacting those great seizure laws (If you have a large sum of money on you, for any reason, they will seize it...then you have to go to court to prove it is rightfully yours...
F*ck cops...I own guns (yep, the 2nd amendment rocks...) and I can react to a lethal threat to my family 1000 times more quickly than the pigs can...of course, I'll get arrested even if I'm within my rights and followed the law (here you must flee if you can, but are entitled to prevent loss of life from an armed criminal within your domicile).

Example 1. I was going down a steep hill last winter and it has started to snow just a few minutes before. The streets had become quite slippery. The light turns yellow at the bottom of the hill, which I brake for. My truck starts to slide. No problem, I am an experienced winter driver, so I pump the brakes a bit. However, the truck continues to slide, and I realize I am not going to be able to stop in time.

So I let off the brakes and continue through the intersection. The light turns red as I enter it. Just my luck, there is a cop sitting in the gas station lot on that corner. He pulls me over and starts ripping into me for about ten minutes. He goes on and on about how dangerous that it was, I could've killed someone, repeating himself several times.

I said, "Please, sir, just write me the ticket, I know what I did wrong." That did seem to quiet him a bit, and he went and wrote the ticket. It aggravated me that he had to be such a dick about what was obviously a no-win situation for me. He watched the whole damned thing, and even admitted he could tell I was was having trouble stopping.

Example 2. A good friend of my brother was smoking a joint with some friends. He gets pulled over by the most notorious, hard-guy, rookie cop in our city, who then went on to make all sorts of extraneous, false, and ridiculous allegations against him about crack, heroin, etc. That's all fine and dandy, and he gives the kid a ticket to go see the judge in a couple weeks. No big deal. Here where I live, you're likely to either just simply have your marijuana taken away (unless you have a lot, then it's a different ballgame..), or else the ticket I described above, which gets you a few stayed days in jail that you will never do (maybe, they don't always impose the stayed jail time to my knowledge), a small fine, and an admonishment from a judge. I find it absolutely foreign that in some states people go to jail for simple possession, sometimes for years. But that is for another thread.

A couple of weeks later, said friend is at a party, and a conversation turns towards the ridiculousness of the "crack" and "heroin" hyperbole this cop had projected at the time of the traffic stop. As it turns out, the cop's fiancee is at the same party and overhears this conversation. The very next day, this cop, and another cop buddy, show up at my his parent's house - off-duty - and starts threatening to kick said his ass, right in front of his friends, parents, and grandparents. "If you have a problem with me, we can settle it right here, on my off time". Not only this, he reveals that he had caught him for marijuana possession a couple of weeks earlier, to intentionally humiliate him in front of friends and family.

He was reported and received 2 weeks off with pay. In other words, his actions simply got him a free paid vacation. Knowing this cop, I am reasonably sure he knew that would happen. What a crock of shit.

Was my brother's friend breaking the law? Yes. Did he deserve this type of retaliation by this cop we are supposed to place our trust in? No. If he is going to defend the law, he needs to abide it himself.

There are mostly good cops and some bad cops, it just seems to me , over the years, I see more and more of this over-the-top type behavior. That's not enforcing the law, it's abusing it's privileges. I don't hold anything against cops in general, I think they do a good job overall, I just really don't care for the ones who feel like they need to play drill sergeant. I don't need Barney Fife on roids, hehehe.

Ooooo, a conniseur! Probably the only people who would recognize those on sight are those with a fondness for naughty toys. Of course, there are more than a few public servents who fall into that category...

In my dealings with police, I've been lucky. I get the ones who genuinely enjoy helping people. After hearing the stories other people tell, I just hope my luck holds. My tolerence threshhold for bullying is very low, and prison jumpsuits would make my butt look big.

What can I say I like my toys...and I should know enough I break them often enough getting rough.

Try this one on my 18th birthday I got my first ticket. Nervous, scared, and worried the cop tells me to calm down. I explain why I am shaking and that it is my B-Day. He says "So want a cookie or should I make it so that you were going faster"

A few years ago I worked night shift and drove home in the early AM hours. I turned right on a red light (the intersection was configured oddly and was altered soon after to make it more clear) and got pulled over.
The cops shined a flashlight into my face and decide that, because my pupils are large, that I must be on coke or crack! I explained to them that my pupils were always that way. They didn't believe me and proceded to search me and my car, pat me down, and get me to "confess".
At first I wasn't super concerned- after all I was clean and there was nothing in my car. Then they insisted they "could tell by the way was acting" that I was "on something!" When I offered to take a drug test they told me they'd have to arrest me first, and "when the results came back positive" I'd be "sentanced for 3-6 months".
I was so upset that I was being acused of something I didn't do that my eyes teared up. This too was used against me. If I hadn't done anything wrong, they asked, why was I so upset?
After a series of stupid roadside tests (on a busy street, so early rising commuters could see me close my eyes, count to 30 and bring my outstreached hands together), they concluded that they didn't have the strongest case and let me off with a ticket. Thanks, I think.
Since then I've heard similar stories from other people about being hassled by cops. I think what happens is that, just as firefighting attracts arsonists and working with young people attracts pediphiles, being a cop attracts bullies. Does that mean that the most firefighters, scout leaders and cops are respectivly arsonists, pediphiles or bullies? Of course not. I'd guess most of them are decent people, but there's always some bad apples to cause trouble.

I hire lawyers to fight my tickets. It doesn’t save money but it’s a pain in the ass for the cop if he has to come in on his day off. I've been successful beating tickets about 3 out of 4 times. Most tickets have nothing to do with safety and have everything to do with making monies for the city or county. Smaller the town the more truth to this. If I get a ticket in some shit hole speed trap small town I just pay it because the their inevitably ran by some inbreed judge and he will side for the cop 100% of the time no matter what

While I'm ranting, I dont want to hear about how hard or dangerous their job is or some other BS like that. Not liking you job is no excuse to be a prick. If your a cop and dont like you job I have one word of advise, quit.

Man, I thought you were going to say that it was the cop who was tailgating you. I've been the target of that a few times. But since my policy is to slow down for tailgaiters, I haven't gotten a ticket through the old "follow them until they speed up" trick. Sometimes they even use their high-beams so that you can't see the lights on top of the car.

Man... once I was in a 35mph zone (about 11:30pm) getting followed by the highway patrol, and I changed lanes and slowed down to 30mph. Okay, now get behind me an pretend you're not following, right? He coasted slowly, slowly ahead of me, and I let him go.

Next I pulled left into a parking lot a few blocks down to use a pay-phone. (My old pre-cell phone days.) While on the phone I could see the lot across the street where he'd just pulled somebody else over and was ticketing them. But by the time I was done with the phone and back into my car, he was through with that person and got behind me AGAIN.

I had to pull into a Bank of America lot and pretend to use the ATM just to lose this guy. I should have taken his license plate number when I had the chance and filed a complaint.


Gydeon.

When I bartended I would leave after closing up, usually about 2AM or later.

To get home we had to go through one of the most notorious speed traps in town. There was ALWAYS a cop sitting there waiting to catch the drunks coming from either our bar or the one further down the road.

One summer night about 2:30AM, I was driving home and sure nuff, Mr Cop was sitting at the gas station waiting.

Now, I had been working at this bar for two years by this point, taking the same route home every night. Cops came into our bar all the time. Official closing time was an hour and a half ago.

The cop pulls out and tails me for about 10 minutes as we drive from one side of town to the other. I knew he was waiting for me do to ANYTHING, so I purposely made turns onto side streets - I think 5 in all - just to make sure that he was following me. Finally we reach the main street and he flips his lights on.

He gets out, gives me the third degree about where I've been, what I've been doing, why it took me so long to leave work (!), where I'm going, if I've been drinking (he asked that three times - and no sir, I don't drink on the job, sorry), and finally wrote me a ticket for...having an air freshener hanging from my rear view mirror. A ticket, complete with court appearance date and time - for an air freshener.

It wasn't until I went to the Sheriff's dept. the next day to complain that I discovered that while he technically could give me a ticket for that, what he was supposed to have done was ask me to remove the air freshener first, and fill out a form saying that I removed the obstruction. The guy I spoke with said this was the first time in 20 years he'd seen a court appearance ticket for obstructed view that wasn't attached to a more serious violation.

They dropped it for me and let me file a complaint against the cop - and agreed that while he was harrassing me, there were probably 5 legitimate drunk driving cases he COULD have been pulling over.

I've heard too many stories of corrupt cops, and the sad thing is that 95% of cops are good guys, but those 5% create so many stories that it's tarnishes the good name of most police.

I had a good US Legal Systems when I was in High School, taught by a guy who was a Marine who served in Nam, a lawyer, a part-time cop, a lifeguard / security guard during summers. The guy had amazing stories, like doing special security during the 1994 Atlanta Games. (Can we say "full SWAT gear & snipers"?) The class had a section on traffic stops, and we did a video simulation where you were the cop, had a rubber gun, and the video would show the same situation with different outcomes.

I watched classmates shoot people on the video screen who pulled car keys out, and other classmates get plugged when they didn't expect the old lady driver to pull a pistol from a purse. (I did fairly well on my turn. Thanks, video games!) It sorta impressed on me just how stressful each and every traffic stop could be for a police officer. (The police car chase videos were great, too!)

We finished the series of lessons on traffic stops with some advice on what to do when pulled over:
- Turn on your overhead light
- Keep your hands on your steering wheel unless you need to grab your license.
- Tell the cop what you're doing before you do it. ("I'm just going to get my registration from the glove box, officer."
- Be polite. (Duh, but some people act like speeding somehow isn't a good enough reason to be pulled over.)

I've been pulled over probably just about once a year since I got my license, I've only ever gotten 2 moving violations. One was out of state by a Maryland Trooper, the other was during a Tropical Storm when I couldn't stop in time and hit a SUV at about 2 MPH). I definitely feel that the cops would have been more likely to hit me with tickets rather than warnings, had I not followed that teacher's advice.

I don't think being "bad" or "good" has anything to do with it. A police officer's job is not to determine right from wrong or to be your friend or to serve the public; their job is to gather a maximum amount of evidence for the D.A. to make a successful case. Police officers have training (based upon the interrogation tactics developed by John Reid) to encourage people to say things they don't want to say. An average person does not have any training to counter this. This is why you have the RIGHT to remain silent and the RIGHT to an attorney before a cop interrogates you in any way. This is why police make small talk with you or say inflammatory things, use race baiting, question your ethos or your morality or your intelligence, or lie to you (police are not legally bound to tell you the truth): to get you to break your silence, thus giving up your civil rights and providing evidence against you. The one thing to keep in mind when a cop detains you is that YOU DO NOT REALLY KNOW WHY THEY HAVE DETAINED YOU. The reason they provide or that seems obvious may not be the truth and you could implicate yourself by saying the wrong thing because there is no way for you to know what the right thing is.

There is a really great book on how to deal with police officers that is endorsed by Zach de la Rocha that I recently bought and I recommend it highly. It is called How to Beat the Heat , by Katya Komisaruk.

Remember: Justice is Blind.

Now for my own cop stories.

There are definitely some cool cops out there... and then there is the LAPD.

One time I was walking with a good friend at 3am on the street, talking about life. We came to an intersection and looked down every street and saw no cars anywhere so we decided to jaywalk. This was the intersection of Figueroa and Jefferson. If you know the area, you can see for many blocks down Fig, toward downtown.

Halfway across the street, I looked down the street and saw a cop car driving toward us, still about 5 blocks away. With its headlights off. At 3am.

We made it half a block before they pulled over to us and turned on their lights. Then they got out of the car with their hands on their guns and flashlights out, yelling at us to freeze and giving us the whole third degree. I didn't know my civil rights very well so I answered all their questions. They asked us why we thought they pulled us over and I rightly said, "I don't know," but my idiot friend said "jaywalking?" They were really giving us a hard time and then they asked for our ID's. All I had was my school ID so I gave it to one cop.

That's when EVERYTHING changed.

Suddenly they were really nice to us and respectful. They talked to us like disappointed parents and let us off without any kind of ticket. Why? My school ID is from USC and most USC students are spoiled rich kids. When they pulled us over, I was just another poor civilian like so many in the area. As soon as they think I'm rich, the rules are bent in my favor.

Fuckers.

I've only been pulled over by a cop once.

I was driving from San Antonio to Los Angeles on I-10 about 3 years ago. This was something I regularly did (and I usually did it without stopping to sleep). About two hours from L.A., there was a sign that said "Warning: Wind Storm ahead. Delay of travel strongly advised." However, I knew that there was no way I could stop or I wouldn't be waking up for at least 12 hours. So, "screw it, right?" So I was driving through the windstorm and most of the only other cars on the road were 18 wheelers (probably braving the storm because they could also not afford to stop). I had to pass up one fully loaded semi and just as I was getting up to the cab, a massive amount of windshear came off his truck, shaking both of our vehicles but my own swerved quite a bit within the lane (I have enough experience driving in severe storms where I don't go off on the shoulder or lose control very easily). A highway patrol saw this little swerve and pulled me over.

Instead of going to the driver's side, he went to the passenger side so that I had to lean over and open the door to allow him to interrogate me. But first he knocked on the window and gave a sarcastic wave and smile from behind his mirrored glasses.

Cop: "I saw you doing some swerving back there."
Me: "'Wind Storm.'"
Cop: "Well, there are people out here on dope..."
Me: "...There's a Wind Storm." (I now know he was just baiting me, but at the time I was really insulted because I've never done any pleasure drugs in my life).

I mean REALLY... It's a WIND STORM, and he pulls me over for swerving within my lane.

Jeez Juro, you were dense...even I could tell that based on your description. lol!

That's true- I remember them telling me "Admit you're on something and we'll let you go" over and over. To throw them a bone, I thought that was pretty clever. Someone who was on something might buy into that line and confess, but there's no way someone who's not on something is going to lie and incriminate themselves.

I hate the cops too!

There was this one time..I broke the law..and they came and arrested me!!! What's up with that?!?

Actually, I got pulled out of my car by an Oregon Sate Police officer, thrown against it repeatedly, told to shut my fucking mouth, and got called several names and told that he would kick my ass if i said a word.

My crime? According to him, I ran a stop sign and then refused to pull over.

However, I DID stop at the stop sign, and looked right at the cop, who was pulled over down the road about 30 yards. My girl friend and i were both in our early 20's, and I had very long hair at the time.

After pulling away from the stop sign, I went into the on-ramp of a freeway, drove about a mile down the freeway, and then saw the state police car flying up behind me with his lights flashing and siren wailing. I immediately pulled over. He walked up to the car with his hand on the butt of the gun, told me, "Turn that shit off", because i had the radio playing very low.

I had my license ready to hand to him, but instead he told me to step out of the car. I started to do so, and at the same time, asked him what I'd done wrong. He grabbed the front of my shirt, threw me against the car, and said, "Shut your fucking smart ass mouth".

It got worse from there.

My girlfriend actually started crying, because she thought he was psychotic and was going to shoot me. He kept pushing me against the car, even though i was in no way resisting, and he wouldn't let me say a word. I actually thought he was going to pull his gun at one point.

He finally had me get back in the car. Then he wrote me a huge ticket, told me i was lucky he didn't kick my ass, and drove off. Was really a fun day. I actually took it to court, and filed a complaint against him, but all that ever came of it was that i got the ticket reduced by half.

But I have had a police officer pull his gun on me and threaten to shoot, but my back was to him and I was running a full speed. I just zig zagged a bit and he never fired, thank god. Ahh..the joys and excitement of youth!