On talking to the police

First of all, here is the rule:

So that’s very clear and sensible, and everyone should know this.

On the other hand, I am utterly incapable of following this simple rule. Here is a story from last week for illustration.

Heading into Camden, Maine, on Route 90, with the family in the SUV, I came upon this dump truck going I dunno maybe 10 miles per hour, and this car following along slowly behind it, and not wanting to spend the next couple of hours slowly approaching Camden, I passed them quickly on the left, in some left-turn lane or whatever was present.

Coming back into the right lane, I noted a couple of signs on the right shoulder, one saying Speed Limit 15 When Children Are Present, and another Speed Limit 15 When Flashing, but as there were no children present and the lights on the latter sign weren’t flashing, I thought nothing much of it.

Looking for a place to park in Camden, Maine shortly after, we ended up in a dead-end corner of a parking area, and I was turning to go out when a shiny Camden Police vehicle pulled up and a young man in a uniform and mirror shades asked if we needed any help. I said no, just thought this led to the parking, and he said no, just police and fire over here, and Take Care and all.

We went the other way to the parking and parked, and as we were strolling toward the actual town the same young man pulled up again in his mirror shades, and asked if we’d mind waiting a minute, because there’d been a “report about your driving”, and someone else was coming up.

My immediate internal reaction was “Aha, I will show this young representative of the authorities that I am admirably co-operative and completely innocent of any wrongdoing”, and said of course.

In a moment a slightly older fellow, not I think in uniform and definitely not in mirror shades (maybe a Detective rather than a Patrolman? or something), pulled up in his own shiny Camden Police vehicle and said that they’d had a report that I had been overtaking vehicles and speeding in a School Zone on Route 90 outside of Camden. I said, ah, yes, I did indeed overtake a couple of slow vehicles, but that the signs had said so-and-so, and there being no children present or lights flashing, I didn’t think I’d been speeding, but that I’d be glad to pay the fine or whatever if I had been (Good Lord, amazing I didn’t offer to clean their boots while I was there).

After a bit of looking at my Driver’s License and talking on his telephone and looking at our license plate number (which apparently had been recorded wrong the first time), the older fellow said they’d just give me a warning this time. I asked if I had in fact been speeding, given the signs and all; he said “I don’t know, I wasn’t there”.

So okay.

And that was the end of my encounter with Camden’s Finest, except for numerous jokes for the rest of the vacation whenever we saw a police car.

Obviously, I completely ignored all of the advice in the very wise and useful video above. And the sad thing is that that was really perfectly okay. Because I’m a prosperous-looking white guy with a late-model SUV and a prosperous-looking half-Asian family in tow, and the odds are probably pretty strongly against the police of Camden, Maine taking advantage of my overly-talkative nature, to my disadvantage.

But for many other people, less white or less male or less prosperous and mainstream-looking, that’s not so much the case.

And that’s just wrong.

We were sad today

Today we were coming out of work, riding in and driving taxis, going in and out of the coffee shop, up and down the stairs, at the corner of 8th Avenue and 15th Street. And we had stopped pushing the shopping cart into the intersection, a little bit onto the street, and we were down on our knees, crying, our tears on the pavement, crying out in a language that might have been Spanish, or Portuguese, or even French or Vietnamese.

We stopped to ask if we could help, a small young woman with a skateboard, a large hobbit-like man with a backpack, a dark-skinned white-haired man in shorts. But we were too sad, a thin brown-skinned man, not young or old, with white earbuds in our ears and everything we owned in the shopping cart (in a few plastic grocery bags and a broken suitcase), and we just cried out more, and beat our fists on the sidewalk.

We flagged down a police car, and we pulled over to the curb and got out, and came over and said “get up, get up!”. And we finally looked up from the ground, and saw us standing there with our uniform and our nightstick and gun, and we stood up unsteadily. “Get up,” we said again, and then we said something that might have been “Go home” in very bad Spanish. And we rolled our eyes and looked angry, tears on our cheeks, and we beat our hands on the crossbar of our shopping cart, and pushed it across the intersection and with a furious energy off down the avenue.

And we looked at each other and said “hard day” and shook our heads, we went back to our police car, we walked on down the street, hitching our backpacks up on our backs, carrying our skateboard down into the subway, poking in the patches of earth around the trees for spare change or deposit cans, feeling the air. And we made our way home.

And we hope that whatever was wrong, we can be less sad soon.