Cops who lie, the erosion of trust, and despair

I’m a middle-aged white guy. I was born lucky (i.e., white male American, with loving, affluent, involved parents) and just kept getting luckier, so I have had very little interaction with the police in my life.

But let me tell you a little story. It will seem incredibly trivial — perhaps even offensively so — compared to the brutality and murder meted out by cops against black folks (and other folks too), but there is a point to it.

Last year, I was pulled over by a police officer.
I was driving my grandmother to a doctor’s appointment. I didn’t know where I was going, and she only intermittently knows where she is :-), so she was giving me directions, turn-by-turn. We came to a 4-way stop. Since I didn’t know whether I was supposed to go straight or turn left or turn right, I came to a complete dead stop and waited for my grandmother to tell me which way to go. As I looked up the road to my left, I noticed a police cruiser parked on the shoulder. Gramma eventually said to take a right, so I did. Moments later I saw flashing lights in my mirror.

I had no idea why I might be getting pulled and I was extremely surprised when the officer told me it was for not stopping at the stop sign.

I said, “I absolutely did stop.”

He said, “Sir, you didn’t even slow down.”

Simply put, that was a bald-faced lie. (And also utterly ridiculous — the cop was claiming that I approached an intersection, going 20 or 30 miles per hour, and executed a 90-degree turn without braking, in an SUV.)

I exclaimed, "What?!" and emitted a few demure sounds of disbelief, while my grandmother piped up and said, “That’s not true at all.” The officer made it clear he wasn't in the mood for a debate, so I shut up and gave him my license and paperwork, and he returned to his cruiser.  READ MORE