So very depressing. It's all about demanding displays of submissiveness whenever they want.

Sally was in middle school when she found out that her friends got hassled by the cops on a regular basis and she didn't. I remember this coming up with relation to the rugby team she was on, and she was one of the youngest kids on the team, so probably mostly high school girls. Still, kids.

She didn't start getting hassled by cops herself until she was walking around with a non-white boyfriend. (And of course they were mostly hassling him, she was just there.)

My high school boyfriend (the one who died of COVID) was fairly dark-skinned Hispanic. He got hassled all the time. The absolute dumbest was when he was driving his old, rusted truck to work one morning and was drinking a soda in a plastic bottle. He got pulled over because the cop thought it was alcohol. Had to do a field sobriety test and everything. He was 17.

When he was 18 or 19, he was shooting a BB gun in his backyard. A neighbor called the police. His mom (white) lost her temper pretty badly with the cops for hassling her kid. The boyfriend was arrested for "discharging a firearm within city limits" and spent the night in jail. Maybe two nights? I can't remember. They were poor, and his mother was not the best, and it was hard for them to figure out what to do. I didn't find out until afterwards.

Also, is it wrong that I'm disappointed that I have not yet seen "driving 55 in a 54" referenced in that thread yet?

4: Given how the prompt was worded ("most ridiculous"), that's probably going to be in the bottom quarter of experiences respondents might report, no?

5: Hard to joke on the internet, but I was kidding. It's a reference to "99 Problems," which was, for a decent subset of white people, the first thing they heard referencing getting pulled over for bullshit reasons.

I always wished that was "50 in a 49" so it would add up to the title number.

5: Oh, oops, that makes much more sense.

The half-brother of some kids I grew up with is white, but grew up in the neighborhood I live in now, so many, if not most, of his friends wound up being Black. He said it was amazing how, every time he was riding in a car with a couple Black friends, they would be sure to get pulled over. Whereas, at least according to him, many of the stops would not have happened had it just been his Black friends riding around. I don't know how accurate his perception was, but it certainly seems logical since, if you're a racist cop, you can't simply stop EVERY Black motorist you see, so picking on the ones who are breaking the color line seems like it would be appealingly targeted.

I believe (second hand) that was Sally's boyfriend's impression too. Walking around on his own, he wasn't terribly conspicuous. Walking around with Sally, cops were likelier to ask some 'friendly' questions about what the two of them were doing.

The corresponding experience that almost every Brit, black or white, including me, has on visiting the (non-NYC) US is being pulled over by the police for walking. Not walking on the road, or walking holding an open bottle, just... walking. Inherently suspicious.

You need to get a dog to walk behind.