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Two years ago, I was in the US for a month and volunteered to chauffeur two Chinese students to a Celtics game as an outing (I was working for a homestay/educat
by maehwasu 11y ago
Two years ago, I was in the US for a month and volunteered to chauffeur two Chinese students to a Celtics game as an outing (I was working for a homestay/education consulting company at the time).
On the way back at night, driving through a small town in central Massachusetts, I passed a cop car, going at the speed limit. The cop immediately pulled out and began tailing me, but did not turn on his lights.
I tried to maintain a constant speed, a couple miles above the 35 mile per hour speed limit, since I know cops treat excessively slow speeds as an indicator of drunk driving.
Eventually, after 15 minutes of being tailed, I hit my foot a bit too heavily on the gas, and went to 45 miles per hour. He instantly turned on his lights, and pulled me over.
The officer was extremely skeptical when he got to the car, especially since the name on the car's registration was my company's, not mine, and I had two minors in the back. After some questioning and prodding about where we had been and what we had been doing, he let me go with a warning.
I shudder to think what would have happened if I had pulled over in the same situation, but black. The officer was serving no sort of duty except to troll for problems where none existed.
I haven't returned to the US since: it turns out there are many places I can live where I don't have to have nerve-wracking interactions with hostile law enforcement, ever.
- toephu2 11y agoSo because of one isolated incident you think all cops in the U.S. act this way and therefore will never visit again? You think what you see on TV isn't just handpicked? and is actually representative of the thousands of pull overs cops perform daily? You think every single black person pulled over gets shot?
- manish_gill 11y agoThis excuse ("bad apples") is getting pretty old. One anecdote can be discounted. Tens and hundreds of them in the past several years are a bit hard to ignore. US cops are bad. Face it.
- rsanek 11y agoThe plural of anecdote is not data.
- manish_gill 11y agoNo, but when the plural of anecdote is enough to incite riots in cities and communities, inspire trending hashtags, movements all over a country, enough to put the problem in the International spotlight, it's almost as good. If the actual data were pointing to the completely opposite conclusion, there would be someone arguing for that. Nobody is.
- benaiah 11y agoThe original quote is actually the precise opposite of this.
- bigger_cheese 11y agoA Similar thing happened to me in Australia. I was visiting a friend in another city. Since I was unfamiliar with the route I was driving a bit slowly (about 5 to 10 km under limit) looking for my turn off. An (unmarked) car was behind me. There were two lanes of traffic. The car sat on my tail so I slowed down further to let them pass. Nothing they continued to sit on my tail so I sped up again. As soon as I sped up siren comes on I get pulled over 'for driving erratically'. The police officer asked to see my license. It shows my address listed as a different city and she accepts my explanation of being unfamiliar with the road and lets me go. It felt like entrapment at the time tailing someone with the intent to pull them over. Around here Police shootings are rare. The exception is one of our states, Victoria. It has kind of turned into a bit of joke on the media - "don't go to Victoria or you'll get shot by the police" sort of thing. There's an article here: http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/poor-training-and-bad-tactics-to-blame-for-police-shootings-20110322-1c54q.html http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/poor-training-and-bad-tactic...