Discussion What unfair experiences have you had with the police?

What (if any) negative experiences have you had with police officers where you felt you were treated unfairly. I’ll start with the two I had.

One, after eating at McDonalds one time I decided to read a book in my car for a while before going home. This dragged out for too long leading to me reading the book under the streetlights at two in the morning at which point a cop pulled up beside me, and began to question me for an extended period of time about my supposed drug use (I wasn't on drugs). Finally he let me go, and I went home.

Two, I suddenly decided I need exercise so I went on a bicycle ride at three in the morning. A cop pulled up beside me, and began to question me for an extended period of time about my supposed drug use (I wasn’t on drugs, but I had had too much instant coffee). He even put me in the back of the cop car for a while, and made me do sobriety tests, but finally he let me go, and I went home.

But then again maybe none of these were really unfair. I don’t really understand what it's like to be a cop, or why they do the things they do, so maybe there was a good reason for it that I just don’t understand. Either way it felt shitty though.

 

Society will always suppress night owls I suppose... I've never had a poor interaction with a cop since I've never been suspected of anything before. I've known multiple members of the local police force since I was a kid and those guys are generally fine. They even gave some of the local youth and I training with their guns. Good times.

 

You're still in around oct 2020, I argued with cop about how the correct procedure of law and he said that they all did not matter when we ain't in the lawsuit, he said this is informal matters we don't need procedure (shit, at that I knew it's definitely pointless, so I ignored him and go away, I just want to corrected him)

 

I think that's rather due to the fact that most people that do drugs tend to be out at night doing who knows what, and since they need time to discuss with people to know if they really do drugs, they go with the assumption that anyone out at night do drugs and needs to be proved otherwise.
What would have been an unfair treatment on the cops part would have been if they incarcerated you or straight out arrested you.
The fact that you didn't get arrested means that they believed you didn't do drugs.

Otherwise i never had any interaction with a cop so no i was never mistreated

 

- I've had a police officer lie and tell me there will be no points on a ticket since I lived in a different state. I paid it, but I ended up being denied insurance on a new application 4 years later due to the mysterious appearance of points from a certain state.
- I've had a different officer police officer leave out important facts on his police report. I hadn't realized he was so crooked, but I didn't have a recording to prove that he was misrepresenting what I said so I had to take a loss.

In short, police officers can and will lie to you. Use a dash cam if you can since the police officer's report may not illustrate what really happened. And have some kind of recording device ready and recording when they want a statement from you. Don't hold the camera or microphone to their face since that will piss the police officer off, but if you can subtly grab a copy, your lawyer won't have to demand a police cam. The lawyer will like that.

That being said, nearly all of my encounters have been perfectly reasonable. Which is why I was caught flat-footed by the above two.

 

A) Because most places have a curfew and B) People out at night past midnight are usually doing something they wouldn't during the day.

As for me, one time I was coming home from cram school, me and my buddies were roughhousing and started wrestling on a patch of grass beside the road. A cop that was passing by turned on his sirens and got out of his car making us sit on the grass yelling because he thought were fighting. Took a while for him to calm down and left us a warning.

Another time, my friend was driving down my street (the street I'm referring to is outside of a gated community so it's actually a big ass road that has 2 car lanes on each side), and when there was literally ZERO, and I mean ZERO cars on this road as far as the eye can see, my buddy did a U-turn (which is legal) and bumped the sidewalk where me and my buddy were walking on. He did it just messing around and wanted to know if we needed a ride. Unfortunately, a cop was just coming out of a back road and saw it. Immediately he turned on his sirens, got out of his SUV, and started screaming at my friend in the truck, cursing worse than a sailor. And I really mean that, considering I curse A LOT. Anyway, the cop was such a prick that after screaming and cussing for a good 2 minutes at my friend who was maybe 17 at the time, gave him a ticket for some outrageous claim, like reckless endangerment.

I was not happy. I was up (around 16 at the time) yelling in his face that he shouldn't be cursing at a civilian and being that aggressive for such a small issue. He was so shocked a kid reprimanded him he got even angrier and threatened to arrest us for some bullshit charge. Anyway, my dad who was on his way to work pulled over and had to sort it out. I guess he calmed down once he saw it was an adult and couldn't act so outrageously. He left soon after.

But that's two out of a plethora of encounters with the police that were negative. Most are just trying to do a job and stay safe. It's unfortunate that there are police officers that shouldn't be ones; not simply because of racism or politics, but because they genuinely aren't there to protect and serve their community.

 

Cops have stopped me for walking on the sidewalk (deadass), questioned what i was doing riding a bike.....in the bike lane, took the side of the attacker in a case whilst making it seem like I was the criminal, pulled me aside from a group of friends (literally only me in a group of like 2 white kids and me) and questioned if i was the one causing the disturbance, wouldnt file a report (literally told me to fuck off), On a lot of occasions cops would deadass just walk up to me and try to start some shit (my advice in that situation is to literally yell for help from people around you or deadass call 911 on the fucker.

 

I’ve never been treated unfairly. As for negative encounters, I suppose that depends on the definition. There was the time the police came to tell me my mom was dead. They were extremely polite about it, but there’s no way I could call that a positive experience.

There was also the time in college when campus security knocked on my door and and I freaked out wondering what on earth I’d done wrong. Turns out my mom called the police because I’d been ignoring her calls for most of the day. I got a long lecture from the officers about how I should be in better contact with my mother, which I guess was unfair, since I was ignoring her for the sake of my mental health.

But, yeah, I know and understand that I’m really lucky. That I haven’t had a truly unfair encounter and I’m always hoping that I never will.

 

Have to agree with @Recouer , the police just questioned you when you were behaving suspiciously .. who hangs out under a street light at 2AM, or cycles at 3AM?. That's basic profiling. They didn't detain you either, just let you go shortly afterwards.
You had it way better than some black kids walking around Chicago at night (non-criminal), who get immediately cuffed and hauled off to a holding cell, no questions asked.

I drove around K-town (cocaine, not korean) at 9+PM when I got pulled over by cops out on a drug sting operation. They even BS'd that they "pulled me over for not signaling coming out of the alleyway". I didn't fault them for profiling. Plus the white female cop was surprisingly hot
I had trouble believing her credentials, she had trouble believing an asian dude driving a nice car was out in K-town looking at property.

My car looks pretty aggressive due to window tinting and smoked out lights (legal, but aggressive). I've been pulled over countless times by cops thinking I did something bad.

 

None. But news about what constantly happens in the US and China makes me grateful for how easygoing the police are here even when they are generally lazy fucks.

 

None, I've only interacted with the police twice in my life and I was handed volunteer police flyers both times.

 

I’ve had a few bad experiences and so have my siblings. We didn’t grow up in the best neighborhood and so the police never expected good things from kids like us and always found us “suspicious” no matter what we were doing. Never helped that they seemed to think multi-racial families don’t exist and didn’t believe we were related most of the time we got stopped. The police also like using harassment tactics around there, too.

I’m not saying all cops are bad, but the ones I grew up with were assholes. I’m pretty sure there are responsible cops that exist, and I hope my hometown will get some of those guys one day.

 

I generally don't encounter police officers. Lived in "good" neighborhoods, drove nice cars, not a lot of walking aside on the street or playing basketball in the community courts, etc. Basically not a lot of opportunites for cop encounters. I mean, forget cops, I don't even meet people that often because of my reclusive nature.

"I decided to read a book in my car for a while before going home. This dragged out for too long leading to me reading the book under the streetlights at two in the morning" I've heard cops will question people for just sitting in their cars in a parking lot. I think the idea is people use cars to get to places, so if you're loitering inside your car in a parking lot, you are suspicious since you aren't going about your business. The 2am bit doesn't help either.

 

That's a fair point. I can believe that there were valid reasons to question me, but what was most aggravating about the whole situation wasn't so much being questioned, but the unpleasant way he talked to me (Probably should have mentioned that in the op). I can't remember the whole conversation word for word, but at one point he asked me 'when was the last time you were on drugs'. Like the idea that I wasn't a drug user wasn't even on the table.

Still objectively speaking this experience wasn't really all that bad though, and in the end for me this is just an unpleasant memory. I don't dislike the police because of this, or anything like that.

Anyways all that aside, I think it might help if police officers did a better job of informing the populace (such as myself) why they do the things they do. I'm not exactly sure how they would do this though.

 

I've never had unreasonable police interactions in my life that I can remember. When a bunch of us around 10-12 or something were climbing roofs and driving spikes into walls to make the climbing easier it was really reasonable the cops had a brief talking to us. Especially since it was daylight and the stores we were on top of were open.

However I'm also white, Canadian and live in a small city of 50k white Canadians. I see a lot of cop cars since I worked 20 years of nights and walked home, but I think I was only stopped once or twice for a question or two then on my way.

About 6 or so years ago one of the volunteers at work, a black guy from the Caribbean on a basketball scholarship was biking to the gym. He switched to the sidewalk, and possibly blew through a red light??, at the end of the block the gym was on. 3 cops stopped him, another car full of cops showed up a short bit later. It was only a ticket but I suspect if I had done it I would have gotten off with a warning.

Generally I call the cops once ever 2 years or so. Two that stand out:
1) Called 911 since a guy was lying on the steps of the funeral home nearby at 4am in -15C weather and either moaning really loudly, or shouting quietly. I couldn't tell if he was dying, doing drugs or what. They sent an ambulance. This was about 2 months ago.

2) On the way home to my old apartment and heard weird banging noises as I turned left at a corner, was looking across to my right because it sounded like it was from a dark driveway there. Walked past two houses and looked ahead only to realize there was a bear on the porch to my left, the sounds had been echoing off the houses. It walked down the porch to me, I kept walking and then called the cops. They didn't find it, but a month later they caught it or maybe a different one about 4 blocks away.

 

In the U.S. (from what I've noticed), our cops are "taught" to fear the populace. They're taught anyone might be a crazy/druggie with a hidden gun. Maybe not part of the official curriculum, but def part of cop culture passed down from one beat cop to another. Esp among cops stuck patrolling less savory neighborhoods. If you are interested in this kind of stuff, you should watch "The Wire", the TV show.

Essentially, our cops don't learn to try to defuse situations : they learn to escalate for initiative if they have any reason to feel you are suspicious. Cops also aren't taught that the "cop instinct" is just fiction, so if the cop thinks you're guilty, he'll do everything with the assumption that you are guilty and will use anything to justify it because he trusts his judgement instead of keeping an open mind and inquiring like a proper detective.

 

It's honestly tough for cops too. If you're in a country (US) with legalized firearms with numerous states allowing carry-and-conceal laws, even a routine traffic stop is a high-risk event. There are only 3 countries in the world with the right to bear arms. US, Mexico, Guatemala. No surprise the highest number of gun homicides happens in these places. The rest of the world has some form of gun ownership restriction.

That said, the recent BLM movement and other investigational exposés do show that poor hiring practices is a large contributor to police/populace tensions too. If you hire people predisposed to be racist/abusive, chances are they are going to draw their guns first rather than defuse the situation, and you end up with a pretty shitty police force.

At the end of the day, it's a crappy legislative situation compounded by institutional failures.

 

Once got caught. Stupid me

 

Ha, kinda reminded of my city's police officers who somehow really like to pull tickets for people who use different vehicles's licenses (for example city A uses 1 and city P uses 8). My mom argued with a police because he stopped her friend's car (they were going somewhere together) because her friend's car license is 1 and my city's license is 8.

 

When I renewing my license the police handling the queue ticket is racist, he didn't want me pressing the ticket both for the queue, instead he pulling a queue ticket from his pocket and it was quite a big queue number 180+ if I remember correctly, then after me he start handling queue ticket with number around 20~40 to people after me.
I finished renewing license dead last but i can't complain since i am in the minority here.