General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Do you feel comfortable with your local cops? [View all]DreamGypsy
(2,252 posts)...so my view may be irrelevant.
When I was 15 or 16, standing outside the Paramount Theater in Idaho Falls, Idaho, with a friend, collecting signatures for an anti Anti-Ballistic-Missile-System campaign, a policeman walked up and took a photo, with a camera...not a phone. No consequences as far as I know...but the FBI probably still knows my location.
At 17, driving my parents' Cadillac, filled with my possessions, I was stopped by one of Chicago's finest and handed a ticket for going above the speed limit on the Eisenhower Expressway, probably 63 in a 55 mph zone. The transformative experience of arriving at my new home in a dormitory at the University of Chicago, leaving my childish roots, and becoming independent was sullied by the $50 speeding ticket I would have to pay.
Some years later, leaving a visit at my sister's house in Sunnyvale, CA to go back to the room I occupied in the house in Palo Alto, owned by the woman who would become my future wife, I merged fairly quickly. The officer in the car that pulled me over said he had to break abruptly and was concerned about skidding. I suggested that he should consider a vehicle with anti-lock brakes. I attended a few weeks of evenings of safe driver instruction so that my transgression wouldn't stain my record forever.
Since then, 38 years or so, the local cops and I have avoided each other. I think they are doing what they are tasked to do and I have attempted to stay within the acceptable boundaries.
However, I have stupidly fallen into the abyss of reading news stories...fact or fiction...that make me shudder at the character of ... the local cops and/or ... the citizens of this nation.