The other time came when a close friend and I were moving to NYC from Indy back in '82. I owned a '76 Mercury that was falling apart. No grill, rusted all around. A mess. But it ran, and got us to NYC. On the way there, in Jersey, a NJ state trooper pulled us over because of the condition of the car. We were told to get out of the car, and after the cop looked us over, he told us to put our hands on the nearby guardrail. So we did as he searched the car. He found nothing, came over, frisked us, found nothing, then said that he knew we had drugs on us, and if we confessed and told him where they were, he would go easy on us. Now, I was young, but not that stupid. "Fuck you!" I thought. "Find the dope yourself. I'm not helping you!" On the outside I said, "We don't have anything. We're moving to New York to live." After making a few cracks about us Indiana rubes moving to the Big Apple, he let us go, but warned that if he saw my car again on the Jersey turnpike, he'd take it in and have it dismantled.
[WS:] Talking about weird cop experiences, I was moving from Santa Cruz, CA to NYC in 1990, and I was shipping most of my stuff via Amtrak Express from San Jose. I borrowed a hippiemobile with Oregon plates from a friend - a piece of junk held together by bumper stickers and duct tape - to take my stuff to the station. With me in the van were two other people, one Brit and one Dutchman - so I was the only person with a CA driver license and US citizenship. Somewhere along Route 17 we were pulled over by a CHP cop on a motorcycle. We did not have any weed on us, but there must have been some roaches in the hippiemobile and who knows what else. In addition, the British dude overstayed his visa for some time and was seriously concerned about any contact with law enforcement, but he managed to keep his upper lip stiff.
The cop had 'concerns' why I had a CA driver license and OR registration, to which I truthfully explained that it was a borrowed vehicle to move my stuff to the station, and then he said "The reason I pulled you over is that you have been weaving, so you either have been drinking or this van is a piece of shit." To which we all replied in unison - "this van is a piece of shit." He asked me a few questions where we were going, what was in the boxes etc. and then let us go. No so sobriety check, no searching the van, nothing. We were all surprised, but also relieved.
On another occasion, my ex and I went to a Carlos Santana concert in Santa Cruz. I parked the car and told her that I would join her shortly, and then took a few hits from a bong (I much preferred that to smoking j's) that I conveniently kept in the car. The concert was great, one could get high by simply being in the room. After the concert, we got back to the car and I realized that I left the car key inside, sitting prominently on the passenger seat. My ex was furious, partly because she did not like my weed smoking and partly because she wanted to take the kid, who was with friends, home. I, otoh, was pretty much mellow about the whole situation, for obvious reasons. So finally she saw a cop car and asked the cop for help. The cop pulled a little metal thing and opened the car for us, and of course in the process he must have seen the bong and me being totally "baked" - but he did nothing about it, to my surprise. Of course, my ex drove the car back home.
When I was a TA for a criminology professor at Rutgers I read an article on police abuses of power that argued that those abuses are often precipitated, among other things, by people not acting with conventional roles and expectations e.g. the cops would be more lenient on a bum acting like a bum, than a respectable middle class person acting like a bum. That may explain the outcome of the above described encounters, we perfectly fitted the roles of "dumb hippies/surfers," which were in abundant supply in Santa Cruz, so the cops did not feel challenged in any way and let us go.
This can be supported by a counter-example of another pull-over by a CHP cop two or so years earlier. I was teaching an evening class at a satellite campus of a local community college - about two hours driving one way. The class would end after 9 PM, and before that I worked another fulltime government job so I was tired when going back home. I was driving an old junker with "Question Authority" and other "in your face/lefty" bumper stickers, when I was pulled over by a CHP cop, again for allegedly "weaving." My attempts to explain the circumstances i.e. being tired after teaching an evening class after a day of work, made the situation worse. The cop ordered me out of the car, first for a sobriety test, which obviously turned negative, then just to walk around to "wake up." What might have set him off was an apparent incompatibility between my status as a government employee and a college instructor and the hippiemobie junker that I was driving.
Wojtek