I've got another story about paranoid police harassing me. This one involved one of those female cops with a chip on her shoulder and something to prove. It's a little long, but funny/depressing enough to be worth the read.
In my late teens, I was driving home from a 24-hour Starbucks at around two in the morning. Young, male, driving at this hour – perfect cop bait. Sure enough, I get pulled over.
The street I was on was partially under construction, and there was only one usable lane. I couldn't pull over without backing up the traffic behind me, so I put my blinker on and waited for the next intersection, turned and pulled over there.
Officer Chip comes over and starts shining a flashlight in my face, just like as*hole cops do in bad action movies. She asks for my licence, insurance, etc, and I give it to her.
She asks (in a nasty tone – a tone which she will never abandon throughout this little visit) why I didn't immediately pull over. I explained the situation with the construction. She clearly wanted to take that further, but saw that I was right.
She asks where I'm headed. I say home. She gets all excited because she thinks she caught me in a lie, and that she's going to get an easy arrest tonight. She's looking at my licence, sees my address, and notices that my car is pointed in a different direction. She says something along the lines of, "So if your house is that way, why is your car pointed this way?"
I wanted to call her the dumbest goddamned person I've ever encountered, but I politely explained that my car was pointed this way because I had to turn because of the construction, which I already explained. She pulls the "don't get smart with me" indignation routine, but she knows she's hit another dead end here.
She just stands there saying nothing, clearly searching the tiny walnut in her skull for something, anything, any reason to get me into some kind of trouble. She looks down at my seatbelt. I'm wearing it. Damn! There's gotta be something, right? I mean, I'm a young male driving around at 2AM. I'm surprised she didn't call in the drug team with the sniffing dog or something. But no. She knows she's beaten.
She walks around my car, looking for any defect. A brake light that's out? A tire that's not properly inflated? Nothing. But... OH! Hallelujah! One of my licence plate lights is out. You know, those tiny little lights that illuminate your licence plate. How the hell would a driver ever know that one of them was out? Why would any cop ever give someone a ticket for this?
Answer: Because they're f**king as*holes just itching for a reason to give someone a ticket. So I got a ticket for letting a licence plate light go out, which, to this day, is the most ridiculous ticket I've ever received.
The cop let me go home, and I assume she went on to harass many other people that night, before going home to masturbate to episodes of Cops.