Got pulled over because he “saw someone flash their lights at me” and it made him “think something was going on”. After he ran my paperwork and did multiple full walk-arounds of my car, he decided everything was in order and I was free to go. I just wanted to get home from work.
Living in MD got pulled over when I pulled into my landlady’s [100%, rich, suburban] community and questioned what my purpose was there. “I live here” was not an acceptable answer and I ended up needing to call my landlady to talk to the officer and convince them that I really did live there, in her basement inlaw apartment, courtesy of her granddaughter. When he finally let me go he told me he “actually” pulled me over because he “thought [my] headlights were out” but on “second glance” they were just fine. Dunno how you can mistake headlights being on or off.
And I know I’ve told the story of when one of my elderly white neighbors called the police on me for training my dog in a public use field and how even the cop that showed up thought the call was stupid and racist.
My dad got pulled over when I was still in a carseat because they thought it was “suspicious” that a grown man would have such a young child with him on a school day. He was driving me back to school from a doctor’s appointment. They made him get our of the car, lean against it, and searched both him and the car because they “smelled something” while he did his best to keep me calm and tell me that it was going to be okay. I was too young to understand what happened at the time. I just remember he was furious the entire ride back to school, and he was still mad when I got off the bus that afternoon.
It really is just Like This, being black in this country.
Once got pulled over while biking on the sidewalk for not having my lights on. Despite that not being illegal. Turned out the dude just wanted to demonstrate to the little fuck he was training how to stop someone on a bike and write a ticket for them. I was let go afterwards. I also once got the cops called on me while waiting outside my house for the pizza I ordered. Cops told me someone reported “a suspicious individual lurking in the front yard of the property”. This neighborhood was extremely white.
Or the time a group of six or seven cop cars followed me (like literally did a u-turn to pursue me) at night with their lights off while I was biking home. One of them slammed on the breaks in front of the sidewalk path I was crossing the street to get to and I had to go offroad on a walkpath closed for construction to avoid him.
To cops, black people are animals to be trained, toyed with, tortured, and hunted. If you are doing nothing wrong, they’ll make up things to have a reason to fuck with you. If you for whatever reason look suspicious (not hard to do), they will take the worst case interpretation for your actions and find an excuse to take you in. And if you’re actually doing something illegal, no matter how minor, you’re open season.
