Police inspire fear, distrust

Recent run-ins with local authorities point to needed improvements

LAST THURSDAY, I arrived at school a little after 9 a.m., a few minutes into my first class of the day. Really, this period between the first five minutes and the last 30 of any given hour is prime for finding parking, since people coming from class have left and those going to class have, presumably, already found their spots.

Thursday mornings, my first and last classes are both in the Music building, and the most convenient parking happens to be in Lot C (the one parallel to Shaw). Since I was late, and some good parking had opened up, I was able to park fairly close to the Music building.

Eight hours later, I rediscovered my car, door ajar and papers all in disarray. The only things that seemed to be missing from my car seemed to be an FM transmitter (a birthday gift) and about five free washes from Jack’s Car Wash (a Christmas gift), which was odd, considering that I’d left a number of CDs and about $150 in plain view for anybody willing to look for them.

I’d always heard stories about that feeling of deep violation at realizing you’ve been robbed, but hadn’t really ever felt anything like it until Thursday. Actually, what I felt was a different sensation — a kind of futile, smoldering outrage.

I certainly don’t blame campus security (who have helped me out an extraordinary number of times when, for instance, my battery has died), but that afternoon, I couldn’t help but feel I’d been failed, just a little bit, considering my car was so near campus.

Allow me to switch gears: in the last month, I’ve been pulled over by the police twice for, essentially, having done nothing wrong.

The most recent of these pull-overs occurred last Friday evening, when, after driving directly behind a police officer for probably about a mile, he pulled me over — on the recommendation of another motorist — for “driving erratically.”

Upon being pulled over, both the officer and I seemed equally confused. The conversation sounded something like this:

OFFICER: I pulled you over because I was notified that you were driving erratically. Have you had anything to drink tonight?

ME: No.

OFFICER: Let me see your license. (He takes it and walks back to his vehicle. He returns about three minutes later.) Yeah, the guy on the motorcycle back at that light told me a white car was driving erratically. (Pause) Do you know if maybe there was somebody else behind you?

ME: No.

OFFICER: Um, okay. Thank you.

Again, I am not bitter towards this officer, but I would presume that if I had indeed been driving recklessly, he would’ve seen my headlights swerving behind him, or my car braking a little too closely to him — observed something, anything.

When the officer left without ticketing me, I was thankful — but why should I have been? When I asked the passenger with me whether she’d been scared or not, she illuminated how ridiculous my worry seemed, logically: “No,” she replied, “You weren’t doing anything wrong.”

The first time I was pulled over this month, it was ostensibly for a failure in the lighting of my license plate. This was over Labor Day weekend, and again, I was driving with a friend of mine. I was not as lucky.

When the officer asked me to sign the ticket — gruffly (officers have reciprocated my respectfulness for them fewer than half the times I’ve been pulled over) — I asked him to show me the problem he’d cited me for.

When I looked at the light he’d been talking about, it was clearly illuminated — which, though I’d pointed it out to him, apparently made no impact on his decision to cite me — and I hadn’t had any problem with the light before, and haven’t since (apparently, it was still in working order when I was pulled over last weekend).

To make matters worse, he marked the ticket as a non-correctable offense, citing some apparently recent change in traffic law that I haven’t read or heard anything about, and was unable to find any news about when I went trying to verify it later.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t have a vendetta against the entire police force, but I hope you might understand how, again, I can’t help but feel more than a little failed.

Though I try to be wary of stories that sound like peers trying to evade responsibility, friends still manage to remind me that I am not the only one in this situation — indeed, during my quest for news about the supposed changed traffic law, I came across a poll (available online at

http://www.speedtrap.org) that listed Fresno as the 10th most popular city for reported “speed traps” by traffic police. Rather, this sort of fear and distrust of police officers feels like a sort of epidemic.

And so, we naturally have to begin wondering: what is the usefulness of an agency that seems to function primarily to incite irrational panic in law-abiding citizens? What is the value in what seems at times like arbitrary ticketing (besides the $99 the ticket is going to cost me to pay)? How does this sort of scaremongering help the community?

As far as I can tell, it seems only to reinforce a sort of social hierarchy: my heart skips almost every time I see a police car, without fail, regardless of whether or not I’ve done anything wrong and I am thankful for not being ticketed, even when I am certain I’ve committed no wrongdoing.

This is self-serving, not community-serving, which is ironic from an organization whose primary goal is “To Serve and Protect.”

So it was difficult last Thursday afternoon, peering slack-jawed through my open driver’s-side door, papers inside all aflutter, and not feel a kind of profound hollowness.

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