Most of my run-ins with police have quite negative. For example:
A few years back a Wilmington, DE police officer conspired with a DNREC enforcement officer to run an illegal dump on the county property next to my fenceline. This particular site is regularly flooded by the Pike Creek, which is a drinking water stream serving tens of thousands of people in Newark, DE. The flooding, of course, washes away the evidence of dumping in a federally protected watershed - unless you get too greedy and dump too much! Anyway, various contractors and landscapers would pull up in their trucks (the fragile streamside road is clearly posted, no trucks) with trailers full of debris and garbage and stop traffic while they flung it into the floodplain.
I used to go and confront the dumpers and tell them what they were doing was illegal and they’d say “no it’s not, a cop told us we could do it” and I’d explain to them that if anybody got caught the cop would hang the dumpers out to dry, since there was no way he’d take the rap himself - he’s a cop, and cops aren’t subject to the law. Eventually the cop got tired of the dumpers complaining to him about me harassing them while they were dumping, and came to my house (to see if his steroid-inflated chest would scare me, I guess?). I wasn’t particularly scared, which seemed to rattle him a little.
After that incident the dumpers would only come by while I was at work, and they vandalized my fence by smacking their big trucks into it, snapping off some of the posts at ground level and tearing up my lawn at the road edge. But I work from home occasionally, and I was annoyed by the vandalism, so I went out there with a friend one day and he video-recorded me confronting the dumpers. That seems to have triggered the next event.
The ringleader is a Wilmington police officer, as I mentioned, and he’s a K9 unit. So when an officer of the county K9 team and another from the state K9s showed up to roust me at 2AM on the solstice it was pretty clear what was going on, but I did not mention it and neither did they, they just harassed me for a while on some trumped-up nonsense about my mail being found on the neighbors property (no, really, that was their official excuse for coming to my house in full armor with two cars, weapons and attack dogs, - they found some of my mail on the neighbor’s property. Really!). Luckily I saw their uniform buttons before they saw me, and I threw my weapon into the other room before they saw it and used it as an excuse to murder me.
Now keep in mind I complained to every authority in the state that was supposed to stop this sort of thing, and they basically refused to interfere with a cop. Some of them were fairly blunt about it. But I am nothing if not stubborn, so I kept this feud going for several years, with me pushing my body into the way of the dumpers and calmly explaining over and over to them that they were fall guys for a crooked cop, and that eventually someone was going to take it in the neck, and telling them that vandalizing my property was childish and shameful behavior.
But - Then It Happened. The dump got too big to wash away in the fall floods, and when the leaves fell, the rich people up on the hill could see a dump from their living room windows!!! Wow, you want to see something get done in the USA, just offend the aesthetic sensibilities of rich people! Suddenly I was taking state senators and county councilmen and district representatives and local community organizers on guided tours of the site, showing them pictures and videos, things were popping! The Army Corps of Engineers were onsite, and the DNREC guy was disciplined (possibly fired, I never found out what the extent of that was) and Speeches Were Made to the People.
Eventually six State employees brought a gradall and a ten-wheeler out and spent a day or two scraping up the dump, and the State billed the cop for the cleanup.
But he didn’t pay, and he never will, and he received no other punishment. Because he’s a cop - and cops are above all laws (except one - don’t upset the rich people). But the dumping stopped and (somewhat amazingly) I didn’t get shot, so I am satisfied with the outcome.
Here’s my only good cop story.
I was on one of those crazy Gernsback Continuum style I-95 flyovers, just north of either DC or Baltimore, on a concrete road 50 or 60 feet in the air, and there was a black object spinning in the middle of the road. As I dodged it I realized it was a turtle, on its back, unsmashed but spinning like it had been just barely clipped by some other passing car.
Now there’s no real shoulder there, so when I pulled over my car was sticking out a foot or two into the right of way, but there wasn’t much traffic coming. So I jumped out and ran back, and sure enough it was an Eastern Painted Turtle, somehow stranded on the flyover, with a small crack in its plastron from being clipped by a car. Just spinning there in the middle of the roadway.
At which point a cop car came rolling up, and since I was obviously caught red handed (turtle handed?) breaking the law by stopping on the flyover, I just walked over as the cop rolled down the window.
The police officer was a large, muscular woman with a fierce scowl who looked like she could rip me in half with her bare hands and use my bones for toothpicks. She beetled her brow at me and growled “what are you doing?!” to which I replied “Um, rescuing a turtle?” and held up the reptile in question, just starting to poke his stripy little head out. The cop’s face just sort of melted into that mom-looking-at-a-new-baby expression and she said “d’awwwwww… you need to get off the road before someone else comes.”
So I left.
