I am sure there are bad cops, just like there are bad lawyers and doctors. My most egregious experience was getting ticketed for going 68 in a 65 zone in Ohio. That was soon after the Feds agreed to raise the max from 55 to 65 provided the cops showed they were enforcing the law.
Every other time I have been stopped, I was obviously guilty of speeding, running a red, etc. No complaint. The cops were usually professional, although some started with an attitude. I was always polite and cannot complain about my treatment at the hands of the police.
I am white, 62 and probably look like an old hippie, except that my hair is short. In my experience if you treat cops like they are humans, they will treat you the same way.
I’m white and can relate to biased policing.
When I was in my early 30s, I was stopped by police going home on a Sunday afternoon after I returned from a newspaper box where I picked up a newspaper, the road was empty and a police car behind me turned on the siren and pulled me over.
The officers asked me to consent to search my car and they inspected my backback for contraband found nothing but my college textbooks and to add insult to injury, the officer proceeded to write me a ticket for driving too slow.
I felt angry, humiliated and aggravated - that I was given a BS traffic ticket even though the road was empty of traffic, I wasn’t endangering any one and not even speeding. I was forced to go to the court, fork over a lot of money to go to traffic school to keep my driving record clean.
If police officers wonder why even law-abiding people see them as an enemy rather than as a friend, bogus police stops are very much a part of the problem. Would you like to meet someone who goes out of their way to inconvenience and humiliate you and cite you for something you didn’t do? I don’t know why I was pulled over that day.
I wasn’t doing anything wrong except the cop following saw no one else and decided to meet his quota for that day. And things like this absolutely have to be curbed. There are justifiable traffic stops and then are sadistic ones in which the officer wants to show he can put you in jail if he has a mind to.
Things like this have happened to all of us at one time or another and my guess if minorities get far more of that on the receiving end than whites do. So they don’t view as pro active police work, they view as petty harrassment and an attempt to try to get them in a compromising situation. Not every one behind the wheel is a thug or a criminal.
Biased policing does exist and its something one knows personally has happened or someone they know.