Have you ever been a victim of police misconduct?

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35. I am an upper middle-class white female from a small-ish university town in the Southwest

When I was 19, a (white) male friend and I were walking down a sidewalk during the middle of the day, when a police officer with a dog in the back seat rolled up next to us with his lights on. The officer got out and informed us that the canine had "alerted" to the smell of marijuana as he was driving by.

Obviously this was a giant pantsload of BS - the dog could smell drugs on us while locked in the back seat of a cruiser with the windows up and driving down the street?

Anyway, then he tells us that he knows we are carrying pot and that if we just confess he will throw the pot in the gutter over there and let us go with a warning (yeah, right!) I was naive enough at that time to have possibly believed him, except that neither of us were actually holding any drugs.

So we tell him we don't know what he's talking about, and he says something like, "ok, I guess we have to do this the hard way", and searches our persons. Then he dumps all of the stuff in our bags all over the sidewalk. Of course he doesn't find anything, which makes him angry. He stomps off to his cruiser, gets in, slams the door, and screeches off down the street, without so much as an apology or anything. We were left there surrounded by all our stuff strewn all over the sidewalk.

I thought at the time that we had been profiled - he probably thought he would meet his quota or whatever by stopping and harassing a couple of college kids who were statistically likely to be doing something he could bust us for. I also feel in hindsight (20 years later) that we were very lucky that the cop didn't plant any drugs in our stuff while he was searching us.

The incident definitely did not improve my already dim view of the po-po at that time in my life, and it's one of the things that make the stories of the Michael Browns of this world completely believable to me. Of course black youth get treated unfairly by the cops - *I* got unfairly treated by the cops as a young adult and I had all the advantages its possible to have in this country. I always wonder if anyone who automatically sides with an officer is just lucky enough to not (yet) have gotten on the wrong side of one of the many bad cops out there.

Also, I have an uncle who was a cop for nearly 20 years. He served on the force in two different cities. He was a good guy, but he left the job because the police force in the second city (a notoriously right-wing area) was completely corrupt and racist. He felt that he couldn't live with himself if he continued to support and work with the other cops in this department, and he was afraid for his safety if he spoke up, so he completely switched careers. I don't fault him for his decision at all, but that's how bad cops flourish in this country.