Personal Encounters with Police

I am a tall, skinny white male with an Ivy League law degree. For some reason, I seem to attract predators. I’m safe when I’m wearing a suit in Manhattan. Otherwise, it seems, I’m on my own.

Police have been among those predators. I have been meaning to write up the stories of my encounters. I don’t have time to do a good job of that at present. All I can do, for now, is to offer brief summaries. I may come back to this post later, with additional anecdotes and/or longer descriptions.

• Long Beach, CA. Off-duty cops, working as security guards, physically abused my brother and me while we were rollerskating around the area of the Long Beach Grand Prix. On this one, we got lucky: a major law firm decided to represent us, and we won a settlement.
• Norristown, PA. I called the cops on an abusive roommate. The officer showed no interest in the roommate, who actually had a warrant out for his arrest in a neighboring county. Instead, the officer decided that I looked odd, and asked me if I had eaten anything that day, and if I knew what day it was.
• Rome City, IN. Three carloads of police officers arrived at the house I was renting, late on Friday night before a Memorial Day weekend. Neighbors told me they surrounded the house and were shining lights in the window. I don’t know the reason. My guess is that a guy in a red pickup truck, who had cut me off a few days earlier in Kendallville, was a cop, and his idea of policing was to throw me in jail on a false charge for the three-day weekend. All state and local police forces in the area denied that they had sent any cars to my place, but I did have separate reports from two different neighbors. So apparently it was an extracurricular event, like you might expect in one of the more lawless developing nations. By luck, I happened to be out on a long walk when they arrived.
• Grafton, IL. My wife and I were driving at a casual pace, birdwatching along the Mississippi. A minivan driver came up from behind and started tailgating me, even though he could have passed. I pulled over and signaled for the minivan guy to come on around. Instead, he stopped behind me, got out of his vehicle, and came walking toward me. That was weird, but whatever; I got back on the road. In the next town, I pulled into a gas station. The minivan guy pulled in, got out again, walked around my vehicle, and punched me in the jaw. Two Grafton police officers were parked maybe 50 feet away. They saw the whole thing. They handcuffed the guy and asked me to come to the police station and sign a statement. I did so. Once inside the police station, they informed me that I was being charged for assault — because, they said, they did not get involved in trying to figure out who had attacked whom. One then asked me if I had any money. I said I had only a debit card. He expressed disappointment that I didn’t have any cash. I assume the guy who hit me did go ahead and bribe them, to avoid being locked up. The district attorney refused to drop charges, even after I submitted my wife’s videotape of the whole encounter. The D.A. dropped charges only when I began filing motions — and she also dropped charges against the guy who hit me.
• San Antonio, TX. I rented a room from a young man who, one day, threatened to blow my head off with his shotgun. For me, that was the last straw, in a series of offenses that included his wife pummeling me with her fists. I called the cops. I played, for them, my recording of the young man’s death threat. The lead officer said this evidence would support criminal charges — and then she advised the young man that he would have fewer problems if he rented to non-Americans (e.g., people from India), because they would put up with almost anything rather than risk trouble with the law. The District Attorney did nonetheless let me know that he was planning to file charges. But maybe someone paid him off. For some reason, the case was dropped.
• Lakewood, CO. My girlfriend, whom I was living with, decided to try to win an argument by calling the cops on me. To their credit, they refused to come in and drag me out of bed. A few weeks later, she slapped me more than a dozen times. I decided to use the opportunity to impress upon her the seriousness of calling the police on one’s partner: I called the cops. The female cop talked to her; the male cop talked to me. He said I could file charges for assault, and the charges would be dropped if I decided not to pursue them. I am no expert in police procedure; I took his word for it, just as I accepted his statement that their rules for domestic violence required them to charge both of us, not just one. So I was charged with harassment, because I asked my girlfriend why slapping me was better than talking to me. You saw this coming: a few weeks later, after she and I had seen a counselor and talked about it, I decided to drop the charges — except, oops, the cop was lying: the city intended to prosecute us, and was not going to drop any charges. Fast-forward to the day I’m facing the probation officer, and she says to me, “You are here because you assaulted … (she pauses to look at her notes) … because you were assaulted … ” Not surprisingly, Slate (Gruber, 2020) now reports that those years of indulging this law enforcement innovation — of charging both parties in domestic violence incidents — actually deterred abused people from calling the police, lest they wind up with a police record.
• St. Louis, MO. A semi truck driver sideswiped my vehicle when he attempted to pass me by going off the road, into the dirt, on an interstate frontage road. Despite the positions of the vehicles, the police refused to charge the driver. This was like the Missouri semi driver who rammed my wife’s company SUV, while she was traveling at 70 MPH in the fast lane, knocking her off into the center strip. He told the cops he didn’t see her. Again, no citation.
• Bloomington, IN. A bus driver deliberately hit me, while I was biking across the campus of Indiana University. The police officer who arrived five or ten minutes later told me that I had fallen off my bike after hitting a pothole. Once again, no citation, despite the fact that the bus driver could have killed me — in a college town that, for many years, has held an annual ride or run in memory of a female college student killed by a driver.
• Columbia, MO. I was dating a woman. I liked her church. She decided to stop dating me. She told me that I was not allowed to attend the church anymore. I disagreed. She called the Columbia police. A Columbia police officer called and reiterated her view that — despite the fact that I had said nothing to her and had not interfered with her in any way — I would not be permitted to attend that church. In a separate episode, the city entered a restraining order against me, on behalf of a woman who called herself “the crazy lady” — referring, there, to mental problems apparently caused by excessive use of LSD — who had actually been convicted of felony sales of LSD. The rationale for that restraining order was that she said I had tickled her son too hard and that, after weeks of having to wear shorts as autumn grew colder, I had caused her to be fearful when I finally insisted on retrieving things that I had stored in her house while moving, including my long-sleeved shirts and pants.
• Indianapolis, IN. In response to a complaint by a mentally unstable female classmate that my presence made her feel uncomfortable, the dean of the school of social work at Indiana University, where I was pursuing a PhD, called plainclothes police to observe my behavior around the classroom area. Meanwhile, on the private level, the dean responsible for campus security ordered me to stop all contact with a woman who was not even a student at the university; instructed me to cease all interactions with my own classmates outside the classroom; and commenced a proceeding whose presiding officials said they weren’t sure what they might charge me of, and therefore instructed me to decide what I had done wrong, and explain why I was innocent.
• Shavano Park, TX. After five years of live-and-let-live, watching me run alongside the road in the middle of the night, an apparently bored police officer gave me a warning ticket based on an excessively restrictive interpretation of state law. I appreciated that he did not write me a real ticket, resulting in a fine of ~$300. But I was outraged that, of all the possible times and ways in which the city could have told me that I had to run on the sidewalk even if it meant getting injured, he insisted upon making physical contact with me, flouting the governor’s order requiring him to wear a mask, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when local hospitals were using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies because morgues couldn’t keep up.

As I say, there may be other episodes I’m not remembering at the moment. But perhaps this list suffices to support the general point. There are many good police officers, at least if you don’t count the fact that they support the bad ones. The police do contribute to an orderly society. For any civil servants, the question is always whether the job could be done better at reasonable cost. The answer is that it most certainly could be.

I’m sure many black males would have a much longer and more severe list of police harassment and brutality. In a sense, that’s what makes this list remarkable: I’m supposed to be one of the privileged ones. If this is happening to me, what’s happening to people who are uneducated, nonwhite, or otherwise completely defenseless?

The fact that blacks tend to be most intensely targeted seems to be a reason for seeking allies. Instead of making it a black vs. white thing, I would recommend recognizing that they are not the only ones who experience abuse at the hands of the police. We should all be working together to push for better policing; this would help us all.