My experience with cops personally has been 65% negative, 35% good.
I could give stories -- and these actually have nothing to do with demos, most of them, though there are those, too -- but a lot of cops are into it for the same reason they attract "badge bunny" gals: the love of power. (There's a great Nietzsche quote on why folks scramble for socially-acceptable positions of petty power like this; have to find it sometime.)
On Valentine's Day night last year I was w/ my girlfriend, and I had not been drinking (thank GOD), and yet we got pulled over. It was 2 AM and I was taking her home. So why were we stopped? "Your tail light didn't look like it was working right." Anyway, it was a 30 minute ordeal: I was ordered to get out of the car, walk off into the ditch beside the road and into the darkness, lift my shirt and show my clammy white torso to "show I had no knives on me" (ha). Then I was made to empty my pockets outwards, too. I have a prescribed, legal anti-anxiety medication they really seemed suspicious of. All the while my interrogator's light was in my eye so I could not see him well, or aything at all, really. It's almost like beig blindfolded when its right in your eye like that.
This cop's partner made my girlfriend, who was in the passenger's seat and had nothing to do with anything, let alone a supposedly funky tail light, also get out of the car. They made us stand apart about 30 feet, her up nearer the highway, and questioned us individually. They asked "What have you all been doing tonight?" Well, it was Valentine's Day night, dumb shit, what do you think couples might do? We said watching movies, etc. They also asked about where we worked, where had been all day, and why we were going where we were going. In the end they could get nothing on us, but it was a real enraging sort of downer on what's supposed to be kind of a nice romantic night for a couple.
A similar incident also happened where again I was asked out of the car, again on the side of the highway and in front of pasing motorists, even though I was a passenger this time and not a driver. "Your tailpipe looked like it might've been giving out ome bad emissions back there." The driver was a guy from Bangladesh (pre-9/11, FYI), a friend of mine. That week was "Banned Books Week" at Borders Books - you know, where they celebrate stuff like James Joyce's Ulysses. So I was wearing a free "I Read Banned Books" button that Borders gave me. The cop really went into me about that. "So you read banned books, huh? What banned books are you reading right now?" (I couldn't think of any -- what ARE some current, if any, banned books?) I couldn't believe it. And again he had me raise my shirt to make sure I didn't have a knife or gun strapped to my chest underneath my clothing. Good God. They ticketed the driver for an expired tag, but that was not why they said we were pulled over initially (remember, it was a "bad tailpipe").
I could go on and on. And these aren't even protest moments, which are of a diff. caliber of harassment. I think we all have similar anecdotes. Fuck the police.
-B.
Chuck wrote:
> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> My response is, one, her perception doesn't seem to
be an accurate
>> picture of America today, where, (unlike America of
the long sixties
>> or some countries where people are really fed up
now), you hardly ever
>> see big, angry protests or uprisings, and two, even
if some did behave
>> exactly as Liza says they often do, that's still
not a crime, unless
>> in a police state.
>
> You don't get around much, do you?