Late night fun with the Police

Did you know that police cars have hard plastic bucket seats in the back? Of course you did, you dirty crook. but *I* didn’t cuz I’m a law respecting upstanding citizen. I got to sit in a police car last night though after getting pulled over for suspected drunk driving due to my erratic acts of remaining stationary behind the wheel.

I live north of Los Angeles and was leaving the Burbank area to go home last night when I got a phone call that was taking up more and more of my attention. So, to be safe (and later ironic), I pulled into a random exit to finish my conversation on the side of the road and be free of distraction while operating my motor vehicle. When I was ready to get back on the road home, I paused at a dark and empty intersection with no traffic light to check my GPS and make sure this unmarked turn would put me on the right direction of the highway. I’m in a loaner car cuz my original was head-on smashed by some lady making a left turn at the wrong time, so I couldn’t find the flashers and just waved a person behind me to go ahead.

No more than 30 seconds pass of me tapping around the “where are you” box, when cops pull up along side me yelling whats going and telling me to roll my passenger window down. Well, my passenger window DOESN’T roll down so I let it go the 1.5 inches and tell them that’s all I got, when they exited their car and opened both my doors ordering me out.

They demanded an explanation for my lunatic act of doing nothing and I explained that I paused in the road for a moment while they emptied my pockets without asking and gave me a mini full body massage with heavy cupping of genitals (none of this “back of the knuckles” procedure they do at airport security) but short of a happy ending.

Since I wasn’t in a hurry to get home and this was my first experience like this, I thought it was pretty cool even though the cops were being unprofessional and kindov jerky (which doesn’t bother me, cuz I support them being that way against criminals, so no worries if its a suspected criminal either). It was like being on an episode of COPS without the fear of guilt so you can kindov just sit back and enjoy the show.

There were 2 officers, so I got to learn a lot of their tricks, which I found fascinating. Like: on multiple occasions Cop A would ask me personal questions at the same time that Cop B would give me physical instructions on what to do and then A & B would take turns yelling at me for not doing what HE had asked while I was busy responding to the other. In response to this, I politely asked them to take a “one at a time” approach to issuing orders at me, and oddly, they didn’t take kindly to my constructive criticism/request and asked if I was a wise guy. “No sir. just human being” I answered.

they liked that even less…

While sitting in the plastic bucket seats in the back of the car and taking in the awesomeness, Cop A sat up front emptying my wallet without my permission while Cop B searched my car from glove box to trunk without my permission.

As my license info came up in the computer as “not wanted by law, stop harassing him you douchebag” and Cop B was failing to find any bags of coke or dead prostitutes with bags of coke on them in my car. I think Cop A started to feel a little sheepish about the whole act of pulling me over and processing me this way…

if you cooperate, they only *verbally* abuse you

Like a true man in uniform however, its not like he could just say that kind of thing out loud, so he started a rapid fire list of questions that he hoped to trip me up on like “where’d you get this car?” – (A: from my lawyer as a loaner while I go through an accident claim”) – “where’s your car now?” (A: “at an auto body place in North Hollywood”) – “what’s your lawyers name?” (A: Matt) – “what was your previous lawyers name?” (A: Sergio) – “what was his last name?” (A: beats me. he wasn’t good with keeping me informed of the case so I dropped him but I can give you the name of the firm if you’d like) – “whats the firm?” (A: “G Martin Jacobs”). And so, he summarizes that exchange with the following:

“you don’t know where your car is, you don’t know who your lawyer is and you don’t know where you got this car – do you see how on our end that looks bad?”…

I responded “no sir, not at all”, but in hindsight I *should* have said “are you deaf? I just answered all those questions. tell me which parts you didn’t understand and i’ll walk you through the parts you had difficulty with.”
When I referred him to the wallet he was rummaging through without my consent for the business card of my current lawyer, the following exchange ACTUALLY happened…

Cop A: Is this your lawyer?..Rich-erd Bosh..nell?
Me: No sir. that’s me…. [Cop A – this one -is the one who processed my name and address into the computer and already forgot my name, but I’m supposed to remember my former lawyers in a car accident cases name becauseWHYagain?]
Cop A: what do you do?
Me: …the things listed on the card, sir
Cop A: [annoyed] “Well there aint no card in here for no lawyer!”
Me: I apologize then, I may have taken it out.

Except I didn’t, as I’ll get to later.

So Cop B comes back from his illegal search of my vehicle and sticks his head in the car to ask Cop A if I smell like I have been drinking, which I thought was rude because I was right there, gawd.

Cop B instructs me to sit sideways out of the car and remove my socks and shoes, asking “how many socks are you WEARING?” – then realizing that the answer is “one per foot” (I wanted to ask if he had been drinking, but didnt), covers his mistake by saying “oh, they’re just really thick”, which doesn’t make any sense since I assumed the reason he thought I had 2 pairs on was due to the goofy pattern, but also because they’re argyle type super thin old man socks (yes, these are really them pictured below)…

POP QUIZ: how many socks are shown above?

I put my footwear back on and did the “follow my fingers” test and also a fun thing where I had to tilt my head back, eyes closed, and count to 30 to myself and tell him when I’m done (I think, so they could mouth-gesture to each other about me without me looking). After passing those two, plus the lightning round AND the daily double question about the French renaissance, Cop B gives me a facial expression that conveys “okay, okay .you got me…a-hole” – the type you give to a magician who just did an unsolicited trick for you where you’re pissed at not knowing the secret at. He admits to me that i’m clearly not under the influence of anything except near-lethal doses of Awesome and now uncomfortably tries to explain away the whole thing as a wash where both me and him share guilt, but he’s the nice guy who will let it all slide.

He said I was just sitting in the middle of the road, in some car thats not mine with no registration or insurance inside (they can detect that now with new “reginsure-goggles”), so naturally they were a little suspicious but they were going to be nice enough to let me off with a warning. He was nice enough to apologize though as they sent me off and I was nice enough to accept it (nah, just kidding, I apologized back for wasting their time by being so non-criminal and everything).

When I refilled my pockets and car compartments with the belongings they had taken out and strewn about, I looked in my wallet to make sure they didn’t nick my Pinkberry gift card and of course right there behind my license was my lawyers business card… this made me check the glove compartment where my insurance and registration cards were, in plain view, though I concede that the neon arrow pointing to them had burned out…

SO, I should be pretty pissed, right? no. like I already said: it was fun and interesting. I got to sit in a police car, learn some verbal tricks, and experience some of their trip-you-up techniques, which I all endorse and support.

If I were drunk, guilty, about to be guilty or was just a jerk with a hot temper, they would have triggered me and nabbed me on something I should have been nabbed on anyway. so good. and the ACLU can kiss my ass.