Police Issues

goblues38 said:

May be the most brilliant POV on the internet I have ever read.

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goblues38 said:

I dont care if you are driving 100 mph......keep right except to pass

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Jonny V said:

Get used to it. I’ve gotten tickets written way down, (low-mid 70’s when I was driving high 80’s). One hot female stater plum let me off the hook when she had me busted at 86 mph in Bellevue, WA. Cops like Raptors.

The worst thing is all the wanna-be’s. Every fool in a clapped out Toyota or dodge is going to be looking to race. Prius people will sneer at you too. One idiot in a Prius yelled that I was wrecking the planet with my gas guzzler. I told him that I was “enhancing my carbon footprint” lol!

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Leftsidej said:

Been reading through this extremely pleasant thread and thought I'd through in my two cents as a current LEO in the lower part of Missouri. I will absolutelyyyyy try to stay very neutral in this response because I tend to (at least I think) try and keep an open mind with anything I do, not just in the policing profession, but in life. (Deeeeep right?)

Baggins - As the above comment suggest, you ABSOLUTELY should file an internal complaint with the department if you felt mistreated by the officer during the stop. While I'm at work, I don't care if i'm in a ****** mood or having a ****** day down 10 reports etc, I will do my best to treat EVERYONE (even the biggest shit bag/tweakers you can think of) with respect until they give me a reason not. One motto that stuck with me from the academy was "treat them like family until you can't" and I try to stick to that piece of advice every call.

One thing I would like to point out just for knowledge, respectfully: Police Officers have a LOT of discretion with enforcement actions, especially with minuscule violations such as traffic violations and even misdemeanor crimes (weed for example, is still illegal in Missouri. If I stop a 19 year old college kid with some pot in his car, there are several different venues I can explore with enforcement action. I do not HAVE to do anything in terms of enforcement. Obviously department policy may change this from department-department, but no where in law does it say I SHALL enforce such and such violation or law.) With all of that being said, when I stop a vehicle for (fill in the blank) violation, my goal upon contact is to see if I can educate the operator of the vehicle WITHOUT issuing them a summons for that specific violation. For example, if your tags have been expired for 6 months and you have been stopped for this violations 4 times without fixing it, i'm going to assume you genuinely don't give a shit and think you're going to keep getting warnings, so this enforcement action isn't working and you probably need a summons. But what if that same person just went through a divorce, has 4 children, only has one means of transportation to get those kids to point A-B and genuinely can't afford to pay to update the tags? Then what? It's never black and white. I know i'm very far off on a tangent, but I'm just trying to give you a little perspective.

I have no idea why the officer you dealt with was a ******* or *******, I think that's completely unacceptable and unprofessional if it was unprovoked and I completely agree with you there. Robocops are not fun to deal with at all and that's why I recommend to completely stay off any interstate forever so you don't have to talk to a trooper. (joke)

To the OP: Probably just checking out your ride or as the other officer stated, you'd be shocked with how many cars you see driving down the street are actually stolen, at least in my neck of the woods. I could also go off on another awesome story about how the supreme court has ruled pre-textual car stops are absolutely legal and constitutional, but that's for another time, haha!

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Chris Thomas said:

Should have thanked the officer and told him "You're a great American!" Ha!

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KYmxracer52 said:

As a cop myself in a metropolitan area, I pay no extra attention to nice vehicles, other than the normal, “nice ride you got!” It’s the wanna be guys who are looking to race everyone even though they have nothing to race with. Those guys are the ones who create hazardous conditions on the roadways.......the same roadways my family drives on and yours. Trust me, even if a nice truck or sports car hits the throttle at a stop light, I don’t get worked up as long as they do it with some common sense in a way not to cause danger to others.

Just some FYI, sometimes there are occasions where police are on the lookout for a stolen vehicle, one that may match the physical description of the one you’re driving. In those cases, they may be following you while they run the registration plate to see if it’s the one they are looking for. If not, they will pull off or go on.

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Leftsidej said:

Been reading through this extremely pleasant thread and thought I'd through in my two cents as a current LEO in the lower part of Missouri. I will absolutelyyyyy try to stay very neutral in this response because I tend to (at least I think) try and keep an open mind with anything I do, not just in the policing profession, but in life. (Deeeeep right?)

Baggins - As the above comment suggest, you ABSOLUTELY should file an internal complaint with the department if you felt mistreated by the officer during the stop. While I'm at work, I don't care if i'm in a ****** mood or having a ****** day down 10 reports etc, I will do my best to treat EVERYONE (even the biggest shit bag/tweakers you can think of) with respect until they give me a reason not. One motto that stuck with me from the academy was "treat them like family until you can't" and I try to stick to that piece of advice every call.

One thing I would like to point out just for knowledge, respectfully: Police Officers have a LOT of discretion with enforcement actions, especially with minuscule violations such as traffic violations and even misdemeanor crimes (weed for example, is still illegal in Missouri. If I stop a 19 year old college kid with some pot in his car, there are several different venues I can explore with enforcement action. I do not HAVE to do anything in terms of enforcement. Obviously department policy may change this from department-department, but no where in law does it say I SHALL enforce such and such violation or law.) With all of that being said, when I stop a vehicle for (fill in the blank) violation, my goal upon contact is to see if I can educate the operator of the vehicle WITHOUT issuing them a summons for that specific violation. For example, if your tags have been expired for 6 months and you have been stopped for this violations 4 times without fixing it, i'm going to assume you genuinely don't give a shit and think you're going to keep getting warnings, so this enforcement action isn't working and you probably need a summons. But what if that same person just went through a divorce, has 4 children, only has one means of transportation to get those kids to point A-B and genuinely can't afford to pay to update the tags? Then what? It's never black and white. I know i'm very far off on a tangent, but I'm just trying to give you a little perspective.

I have no idea why the officer you dealt with was a ******* or *******, I think that's completely unacceptable and unprofessional if it was unprovoked and I completely agree with you there. Robocops are not fun to deal with at all and that's why I recommend to completely stay off any interstate forever so you don't have to talk to a trooper. (joke)

To the OP: Probably just checking out your ride or as the other officer stated, you'd be shocked with how many cars you see driving down the street are actually stolen, at least in my neck of the woods. I could also go off on another awesome story about how the supreme court has ruled pre-textual car stops are absolutely legal and constitutional, but that's for another time, haha!

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Ruger said:

This thread could have gone bad, but some level heads (particularly @Leftsidej ) saved it. Thank heaven.

I serve as a reserve sheriff's deputy and am the background investigator for the Sheriff's Office. No, I'm not a wanna-be. I'll be 65 years old in August of this year, and I have no adolescent aspirations or pretentions. I served as a Department of the Army career civilian for 36 years, retired, and serving got under my skin. So I've very happily found another way to continue to serve. That's not germane to the thread, but it tells you where I'm coming from.

Many people only see the uniform. I have had pleasant conversations with people while in uniform, see them the next day and greet them just as warmly, and they look at me like I'm a psycho because they didn't see me as a person when we talked the day before. They didn't talk to ME, they talked to a COP. My sense is that a great many misunderstandings would be avoided if the citizenry saw LEOs as real people, real living souls. The same thing happens to members of the military, sadly, and it's a remarkable commentary on how preposterously blind to the human element humans can be on a routine basis.

The LEO who pulls you over is a real person. His momma just died, his marriage is going south, his kid just got picked up for drugs or DUI, his hemorrhoids may be killing him, or it may simply be the end of a long shift in which somebody's 14 year-old kid took their own life. Yes he's supposed to be professional, polite, kind. Officer Friendly. But he's just a man, or she's just a woman. He (or she!) will try, he truly will, but he may not always succeed like he'd like to. Please keep this in mind.

I got stopped by a female officer in my Raptor one time. I have forgotten why, but I do remember that my truck was new at the time. She was polite and warned me about whatever I'd done, and I was polite and accepted her admonitions with thanks. She smiled, started to turn away, and then turned back and said something nice about my Raptor. I said, "Thanks! Want a peek under the hood?" She shook her head, said no, and then stopped. "Um, yeah," she said, "I really would!" So I popped the hood, hopped out, and gave her the Ford Raptor Orientation Briefing. She loved it, and I made a friend.

The most common radio call I hear from members of my agency is "10-8, verbal." That means that the deputy is back in service from an encounter with a civilian, and he issued a verbal warning in lieu of a citation. I hear that so many times a day and hear "10-8, one cite" so infrequently that it's literally astounding. Leftsidej is right - an LEO has a great deal of latitude in his encounters with a civilian. One of our guys was involved in a deadly force situation with a civilian who was armed with a big Bowie knife and a club, and was confronted by this screaming man at very close quarters inside a truck stop. Another LEO might have shot him and would have been entirely within department guidelines and the law to have done so. Our guy tased him. He lived. No blood on the truck stop linoleum. The guy turned out to be completely crazy and instead of being prosecuted for assaulting a protected person, he was transported to a mental hospital. Get it? Latitude. Discretion. Give an LEO enough wiggle room to exercise that latitude, be as polite to him as you would to the Pope or the Queen, and he will almost always take that opportunity and be glad of it.

During my career with the Army I came to understand that the people who work for the military - uniformed or civilian - are most definitely not a cross-section of Americana. It's a different mix than what you might see at the bus depot or the airport. They're a cut above. I've found that the very same is true of LEOs, and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to work with both.

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