Reply #104: Riding while white, long-haired and raggedy-assed in the early '70s...

[warren pease]

I'm riding in the passenger seat of a friend's car, fast asleep, middle of the night, dead to the world. Next thing I knew, I was picked up by the armpits and deposited in the gravel on the side of the highway. Then the screaming and flashlights go off, just before the kicking begins. Since all three of us were sober, had no open containers or drugs, the cops felt it necessary to supply us with something.

So we went to jail for possession on planted evidence -- four one-ounce baggies of that incredibly noxious and useless pot that used to sell for $10 or $15 back then. Amazingly, only one of them showed up on the police report. We were fortunate we weren't charged with possession with intent... We all got 30 hours community service, which none of us ever did, and life moved on.

Fast forward about 25 years and I'm doing 110 in a 55 -- no shit -- and of course I get stopped by a Santa Clara County sheriff. I'm wearing a nice Italian suit and tasteful silk tie, driving a year-old Accord, hair trimmed to respectability and I he asks me if I know why he pulled me over. I tell him I simply can't imagine why he pulled me over, at which point we both bust out laughing. And after we yuk it up for a couple more minutes, he lets me go with a warning.

Like a recidivist, career speeder is going to give a shit about a warning from a sheriff. We both know it's an exercise in futility.

We both take off, spinning our tires in the same damn gravel I got a face-full of on the Hwy 237 roadside, but that time on the way to Santa Clara County jail 25 years prior.

So gee whiz... do you suppose profiling actually exists?

Can you imagine how dead I'd be if I were a black man?

Or if allowed to live, how many counts of possession with intent to distribute I'd have had lodged against me?

Or how I probably couldn't afford a decent lawyer and would have got some deal-cutting PD instead?

And how I might still be in jail to this day on a classic chicken-shit beef like that?


sf