cop intimidation tactics

"Yeah that's Nicholas Ivan Tanner--"
"Hold on, N, I, T--"
"Repeat that's Nicholas Ivan Tanner--"

Oh, the imagery.

So so baffling to suddenly be a john.

We stammered our way out of it. [Girl] was amused when told later but we were pretty pissed and freaked. In retrospect he may have been having a laugh, in which case: hoowee doggie funny one dude.

Or did you mean by the police?

My uncle was head of the Mpls vice squad in the late '70s/early '80s. Strange TV movies have been made about his work. In 1995, 3500 cops showed up for his funeral, plus pretty much every politician and local media person going. Therefore even here I have no fear of cops (it's amazing how they'll be very very careful what they say or do when you mention you write for a broadsheet newspaper when meeting them, say when your friends are being searched for drugs).

Basically, if I wanted cops in Mpls to leave me/friends alone I had *the* name to drop (but never abused privileges re: getting in First Avenue or actually doing anything shifty). Lately I've had to let cops into friend's hotel room after a huge altercation and did little wind-ups to them, eg. saying 'please' at the end of sentence if they didn't put it there themselves.

One of the detectives visited my mother at the town hall to tell her my life would be easier if I'd shave and cut my hair.

'Some small metal elves' would have been great in a Brizzle accent.

Nabs, the 'I write for the Observer' drug search of 1994 happened when there was a £10 bag of zoot in my satchel. I was stopped with my friends driving through Bishopsgate Checkpoint Charlie; they were ravers taking some amps to a party. The driver was v. posh, her dad worked for the Home Office in Tunis. One of the boys decided to SPARK UP on Tower Bridge so van cabin REEKED when stopped routinely at post-IRA checkpoint. Search of boys ensued while they waited for wPCs to search us. Boys did hijinks while being searched so cops took eyes off us and our hands for seconds - enough time to hide bag of zoot in (already searched) obscure part of van. WPC searched us, asked what we did, got told, perked up a bit, found nothing. We drove off going PHEW (I may have told story elsewhere).

Just because I can think on my feet doesn't mean I wasn't shaking like an elastic band after this!

So, finally, building surrounded, friend and friend's friends come out of building acting innocent. Cops yell "hit the ground," rush in, and form a protective barricade to usher friend and friend's friends to safety.

Friend act blase, thanks cops for the escort, and drives away.

Now he's convinced that it was a karmically bad decision and that he will be paying for it for years, so he never argues over tickets, etc. and donates heavily to law enforcement charities. Oh, and he gave me that laser pointer :)

then again, i don't know why they're so worried about that nowadays, what with Asscrotch and the Rehnquist Court bending over backwards for them.

Seriously, though, the whole civil liberties crackdown has me more than a bit concerned.

Anyway, at age 17 I jumped a man in a parking lot, after seeing him haul-off and knock down the woman he was with. I saw red and went after him. To make a long story short, I was arrested on assault charges, he was arrested on battery and drunk in public, after we're both treated by the paramedics (I busted my knuckles and bit through my lip - he was worse off) we ended-up at the police station. Get this - the cops told him not to file charges 'cause it would make him look bad to admit in court that a 17-year-old female had beaten the crap outta him. So I walked free. One time I think the justice system worked in my favor.

The police here are funny, a friend joked today that we should call the police to shut up this 7 year old Into The West scruffy kid busker who was singing the Fields of Athenry over and over and over in Temple Bar square outside the flat I was in. It was like Finbar Wright getting molested or something. Anyway we joked you'd have them sending a riot squad down and just knocking heads and making nonsensical comments like "noone leaves till we find the busker".

As ridiculous and implausible as that joke was it still kinda sums up how folks see the police here, ie an organisation with a tendency to completely misread situations wherever this is possible, they'd send a traffic cop to stop a mass murderer etc etc.

she didn't have ID on her

we were told that we had two strikes against us, doubling up "which is an arrestable offense" and not having ID "also an arrestable offense"

i think the second thing is complete horseshit?

I have a total of nine relatives who are cops. All of them have told the family some truly heart-racing stories, and four of them were shot in the line of duty (vs. being shot at, which all of them of course have been). One of them has worked undercover for seven years. He's visibly aged since then.

I'm never unkind to cops and never would be. If they were being unduly unkind to me, I would make mental notes of them all, note their badge name, ask for their ID #, remember all the little data points of the incident in question, and then report them. If that doesn't work, there's always the court system. But I would never be uncooperative. That's always a deal-breaker and no way to ingratiate oneself to a cop.

Eventually he shines his flashlight into the back and notices the milk jug of water on the floor (the car had a bad radiator). "What's that?" he asks as my friend hands it to him. "Uh, its water". Then I heard about the dumbest thing I think I've ever heard anyone say: "It doesn't look like water".

After we eventually stopped laughing he let us go with some vague warning about not making trouble in his County.

I also made my way into the drunk tank once. I was apprehended outside of a bar in downtown Monterey the same weekend that Tiger Woods was 'assaulted' on Pebble Beach. The cops were out in force and I got lucky. I spent the night in a cell and went home with a warning. I can't recall if they tried to 'intimidate' me per se, but I did get cuffed and tossed in the back of a cruiser in front of a bunch of people. Apparently I was yelling and cursing the whole time. Not one of my prouder moments.

i thought steak and shake was one of those little packets that has steak and crumby flavor dust inside, you shake it around before you fry it?