Cops tick me off

C'mon, stop saying you all hate cops... who's the first ones you call when some ASSHOLE tries to screw you over?

Maybe I just haven't had enough experiences with them but I've never had a problem. No cool stories.

Edit: That's a freaky story above though. Maybe people should have audio recorders in their cars or something.

I think you're underestimating the power of duress. Not everyone is as smart, collected, or lucky as you are.

That may be the impression you got... but what if they were looking for two people who had just murdered somebody? They were on their guard, but upon seeing your identification they realized you were a couple of harmless jaywalkers and not the two notorious axe murderers they were looking for. They are under no obligation to tell you anything at all about the truth of the situation, although I've been in a similar situation where they did explain that the friend I was with matched the description of someone wanted for fleeing a fatal bar fight. They were extremely on guard until they verified who we were... because until they did, they had to assume that we might try to kill them to get away.

Unless they said "we're changing our attitude because now we think you are a rich kid," you may have been letting your preconceptions color the situation. Of course, there's also the chance that you are completely correct in your assessment. I do wonder, though... would you have been happier if their attitude hadn't changed, and you and your friend were beaten and arrested? That would be very egalitarian... I can't help but get the feeling that you are angry at not being more thoroughly harrassed.

Number of times cops pulled you over in your home state....6
Number of times they harrassed you cause you were different....uncountable
The pleasure of knowing when they tried to force you to admit Credit Crad fraud and instead embarassed them in front of the FBI at 16....priceless

I had so many "mini" run ins with the cops when I left my home state...they had an unmarked following me to the border. LMAO

You're definitely right that I don't really know their intent. But somehow I suspect that my being a college student wouldn't have deterred them in their search for people fitting my description (which, by the way is impossible seeing as how I've never seen a person fitting the appearance I had at that time-- bright red, long hair with a series of dark horizontal black stripes around the circumference of my head and repeating all the way down my hair. Also, giant, ugly air force boots that have air valves on the sides). It's not as if the LAPD (or cops in general) aren't known for applying duress to gather enough evidence, real or otherwise, to make a case. You're right that I'm letting my preconceptions color the situation, but that's because I can rule out the appearance and I imagine it would have been on the news if there were mad circus escapees out that night.



Well, I'm only angry because if they had beat me then I could have masturbated to it later.

I think "lucky" was the word in that situation.
If I was being confined, starved, tortured or deprived of sleep by interrogators I could see myself admitting to shooting Lincoln, setting the Chicago Fire, and blasting the nose off of the Great Sphinx.

Haha! That's great. The worst I had was the post office regularly opening all my mail by running razor blades up the edges. I'd say it's because the people I wrote to were very vocal about their hatred of the government, but then I'd be criticized for not knowing the intent of their actions... So I guess they were just dickheads and I'll leave it at that.

That was you!? That's not cool.

Isn't that illegal? Or at least requires a court order, like wiretapping?

Isn't that illegal? Seeing as how the burden of proof is on me, I can just imagine how long that case would have lasted.

Me: "I'm getting all my mail opened."
USPS: "We don't know anything about it. You can fill out a complaint form if you want and we'll get right on that."
Me: "Thanks."

Perhaps... but if a public institution is violating my civil rights, I'd complain to a different federal authority than the one I suspect is doing it.

I don't really like cops that much.

Friend of mine got raped on her way from from school one night. She identified the guy and everything, but the cops only held him over night. They told her that he'd out in a couple months anyway, so there's no point.

Needless to say, she saw him again a few days later.

Wether it's a judicial problem or it's a problem with the police, I think one thing is for certain -- if you spend too much time on the force, you're likely to get very jaded.

And for some people, that seems to be enough to not do their job.

That's what vigilanties are for. YEeeha!

She wouldn't have seen him when I was around.

I guess one of the benefits of being from a small town where you know all the cops is that sometimes you can make up your own "restraining orders" and the powers that be will look the other way.

On another note, the first guy I ever dated was a cop. At the time I thought that was the hottest thing in the world. We will call him Bill. (His real name was Darin but I don't like to name names.)

I knew his boss at the police force through an online BBS I connected to through my Commodore 128 computer. Yea, you heard me right, my bitchin Commodore 128! Try not to drool when I talk about it. It was a multiline bbs where up to 12 people could dial in and chat at once.

Anyway, I mention to the boss cop that I was dating someone on the force. He says, "Oh is it Bill?"

I laughed because Bill was sure that no one knew he was gay.

FUCK THE POLICE!! We are living in a police state.

You're in Los Angeles too?

Personally, I call my rather large best friend. We tie on our steel-toe boots and sally forth to put the fear of 'Greater than thou' into said asshole.

Okay, so we only actually did that once. (Successfully, I might add.)

Regarding the Police, I think I would respect them a little more if only they'd simply admit when they're wrong about something. Instead, we get bullshit tickets for miniscule, nonexistent, or completely unrelated stuff when they don't find what they expect (or hope) to find.

I don't hate the Police, however. I'l spell it out:
I Do Not Trust the Police.

(And yes, I too live in Los Angeles.)

Years ago I worked a graveyard shift and usually hit the road at 7am, now in the state i live in (nevada) it had allways been legal to display your front license plate in the windshield of your vehicle if your vehicle wasnt designed for front plate displayment.

One day i leave my job, get onto the highway and immediatly get pulled over by the highway patrol. My "crime"? Not having my front licence plate mounted to the front of my car.

It would seem that someone somewhere had gotten a law passed that on this particular day at 7am the law was changed where displaying a licence plate in the windshield was no longer legal and you had to have it on the front of your car.

Law went into effect at 7am i got pulled over at 7:02. Ticket cost me nearly 200 dollars.

That's shady.
I wonder if the cop had seen you pass by every day and was waiting for the law to get changed to nab you.

I love cops They're hilarious.

Most of them went into it with good intentions. Maybe they thrill to power a bit, but it's important to them to feel like good guys, the knight errant keeping things safe for the average joe (though their notions of that "joe" vary by upbringing and experience). If you look them in the eye and treat the situation like you're solving a problem together, then you will usually walk away with a good story and nothing else, unless there's, say, a warrant out for your arrest (and even then, there are possibilities).

My favorite cop story: several years ago, I was bartending in a corporate hell restaurant downtown. Often, after work, my first act was to pack a one-hitter in the car and smoke up on my way home. Often, I had just put in a double waiting/bartending between my two jobs. This particular day, I was stopped at a light, and I took a hit. I sat there a minute, looked up, saw a green light, and seeing the intersection clear, I proceeded. About halfway through, I realized that I'd seen the light ahead of me, and that my intersection was still red. Did I mention I was 2 blocks south of the city police headquarters? Looking left, I noted that, yes, there was a patrol car among the on-coming traffic. He pulled out behind me and flashed his lights. I rolled down the window, having exhaled mid-intersection, and dropped my oney between the seats. Ossifer Goodfellow walked up and axed, "Do you know why I stopped you?"

I looked him in the eye and said, "I don't know."

"Well," he said, "you ran that red light."

And I replied, quizically, "But I stopped?"

"Yeah," he said, scratching his head.

I looked off into the distance, searching for the truth. "well maybe," I queried, "I saw the light ahead of me was green?"

"Yeah." he said, and stood a second. "Well, I'm not going to write you a ticket."

"Well, thanks." I said.

"Just be more careful."

"I will," I told him, quite genuinely, "sorry about that."

He walked away still scratching his head, like he'd pulled over a fucking sasquatch. It was most gratifying to my stoner self at the time. These days, I don't do more than drink, and even there I'm a snob, drinking only fine wines, beers, and liquors, but this story still gives me a kick.

I first want to say I feel bad for any RL cops that end up reading this thread!

Several of my dad's friends are or were cops and I have a couple friends of my own that are too - so I relaize that most cops are good guys who care about the community.

However, I have several bad cop stories LOL. I suppose I can reveal one.

This one isn't horrific or anything, I actually look back and get a good chuckle from the whole ordeal. Maybe I will share more of a horror story one later on, maybe about my "cocaine/burglary incident". No, I didn't have any coke or even partake of yayo back then, and I am not a burglar! LOL!

When my brother and I were in our early 20s, a good lifelong friend of ours had a cabin on Balsam lake in Wisconsin - beautiful lake by the way. We had many long weekend parties out there - what else are college kids supposed to do ya know?

Well, there was a DNR officer that patrolled the lake - he hated us, and that's ok, he was an old man and I am sure we drove him nuts with our parties, but this guy was overboard - like a friggin' drill sergeant. He would routinely stop all of our boats, make us go pick up the skiers and them give us lectures...

One weekend, we decided we had so many people that we didn't have enough room in the ski boats to hold us all, so we rented a pontoon from a boat rental on the lake. All the nice ones were already rented, so we got this old banana colored scow. This damned 1970s POS had a 5 horse Johnson on it and we were trying to get to the end of the lake where the treeline would give us a bit of a windbreak for skiing, in a nice bay. This pile of crap pontoon is doing about 3 knots and it's a BIG lake. Our ski boats are whizzing around us. So we spend the next hour and a half putting along.

We are almost to our destination and water cop decides to come harrass us. Apparently in Wisconsin, life preservers are required. Our ski boats had them, but the pontoon did not - the owner of it never gave us any. The water cop freaks out and orders us to drive the pontoon all the way back to the boat rental to get preservers. I protested a bit and said "can't we send on of the ski boats back to get them?". "Nope, I want you to drive it back to the boat rental and then I want to talk to you." I said "well isn't that sort of more dangerous? You want us to drive back without preservers when we could just sit here and wait for them to be here in 15 minutes instead of an hour and a half if one of the ski boats went and got them?". He says, "Don't get smart with me! Now turn it around and drive it back to Buddy's!"

Sigh, we did as he said, and when we finally got back to the bay we wanted to ski in, having lost over 1/2 of our day, he pulls out little rulebook pamphlets and makes us read along with him the rule pertaining to life preservers!

Then, he takes a life preserver from the bottom of his boat, and tosses it over his shoulder into the lake and says, "See that action? You don't even have to be wearing it, ya know, in case some teeny bopper from Minnesota falls in and can't swim to save his life!". Wow. We are ALL accomplished swimmers - most of us have are red cross certified advanced life savers and several have been lifeguards including both my brother and I. Not to mention he was well aware that we were all strong swimmers.

So we had to sit there and listen to him lecture us for about another 20 minutes and then he finally lets us go. We got about 2 hours of skiing before the sun went behind the trees and we had to wrap things up, all the while he was circling the area watching us.

What a dickhead. The upside is that he has cancer now.

Well Hiro, you have to take alot of those stories with a pretty LARGE grain of salt. They're generally one half (if that) of what actually happened. People tend to want to portray themselves in the best light possible so they kind of tone down their behavior and amplify the behavior of the police.