What are your local police like?

[Archae]

With all the writings about police departments, (I just read another story about the NYPD being brutal, over at Crooks And Liars,) how about the cops you know or interact with?

Since I live right on the border between the Town Of Sheboygan and Sheboygan city, I interact with 2 police departments, county and city.

Less than 2 weeks ago I had a good experience talking to county cops, a local drugstore (about a block from my place,) was held up.
They were polite, professional, asked the right questions, even joked around with me.

When I travel into Sheboygan city, I have no trouble with the city cops either.
Our city cops can at times be simply lazy, letting perps off the hook with warnings.
(Nothing serious, naturally.)

How about the cops in your area?

[arcane1]

1. I've seen San Francisco PD actually work to accommodate spontaneous marches

[XemaSab]

2. Trigger happy

About once a year there's an officer-involved shooting.

You can set your watch to it.

[markpkessinger]

3. My local police are the NYPD . . .

. . . and a bunch of jack-booted thugs!

[Cleita]

4. I hardly ever see them. I did watch them and the fire department work at a car crash

where they had to use the jaws of life to remove the driver. We forget sometimes that they do other things than arrest people.

[rock]

5. Lazy, practically worthless

Did I mention dumb?

[onethatcares]

6. St Petersburg FL

the patrol officers seem to be courteous and do their duty in a good way. Occassionally, there is an idiot that has to try to out run them after a car theft or jacking which leads to the death of either the perp or a citizen or two.

I haven't had any contact with the SWAT officers but I am certain they are a different mold.

Pinellas County road officers, seem to be like the ones above. My contact with them has been pretty limited.

[bigwillq]

7. Mine are typical small-town cops

I live in a small town (about 18,000 people). Most of the cops have a connection to the town.
We have a few bad pockets (high crime) in the town, but I believe it's a relatively quiet town. Bar fights, domestic disputes is what keeps them busy most times.
But the cops are actually more annoying when they come to the better neighborhoods because it seems like, to me, that they're always looking for something to do. They won't hesitate to pull you over for going 5 miles over the speed limit in the better neighborhoods.
All in all, they could be a lot worse. I did have one bad run in with a cop. It really wasn't that bad, he just got snippy with me, and I got snippy back. lol
I later got my ticket dismissed.

[MindPilot]

8. Compared to some others, San Diego PD is remarkably restrained.

They were very accommodating during the Bush-era anti-war protests, and even left the Occupy people pretty much alone. They have had their share of excessive force incidents, but none of those were racial. We have a new female police chief, and she is cleaning house--a couple of corruption incidents have already been dealt with. I think she is establishing that she is not taking any of the business-as-usual shit from the officers.

When ever anything happens that is the least bit out of the ordinary, she is on-scene, talking to civilians and facing the media. Not unusual to turn on the tv news and see her at two or three community events, crime scenes, and schools in one day.

We actually see cops on foot--walking a beat in my neighborhood.

It is an interesting dichotomy since SDPD is one of the lowest paid departments in CA and they are losing officers and having recruitment problems, so one would think there would be more issues, but there are not.

[Initech]

9. Fullerton, California. Enough said.

This is the police department that was famous for beating and killing a schizophrenic homeless man.

[CBGLuthier]

10. Today one of our officers got his bond reduced from 5,000,000 to 500,000 for the rape charges he is

facing. But,to be fair, most of them are not rapists.

Now the state troopers, they are a bunch of assholes with one facing rape charges and another who resigned after getting caught drunk driving a state vehicle and another pair who beat the shit out of a black DEAF man for not following their orders.

[Callmecrazy]

11. I try not to interact with the cops in Broward County...

or anywhere else for that matter.
I was pulled over once for speeding here and when the cop asked where I was headed I said," Officer, with all due respect, I won't answer any questions. Here are my documents." He said, "You just looked a little lost, is all."
I stared at him with a blank face and then asked if I was being detained or under arrest and if so I still have nothing to say and may I be on my way?
He took my documents, wrote me a ticket, explained how I can handle it and I was on my way.
I took my citation to the ticket clinic, paid $60 bucks and the ticket was dismissed.
I refused to be baited by the local head-crackers.
I guess he didn't think I was lost after all.
I had a little peace weed on me too and I didn't need that drama either.

[otohara]

12. Like Ferguson's

at an Occupy event I spoke to a couple of policemen and they called the protestors scumbags, dirtbags, garbage. I said, I'd never been called a scumbag before. Oh not you Mame.

[LisaLynne]

13. The cops around here, two cities and county, are lazy at best.

That's just the truth. Yeah, there are a few that are probably okay, but when my brother's house was broken into, the cop they sent out wouldn't even get out of his car. He just said that soon, every house in the city will have been broken into, so what is the big deal. Another time, someone threw something through my window. Same thing -- cop barely got out of his car. When my brother was younger, he got pulled over by a cop for a traffic incident and was asked why a white boy like him was dressed like the N-word. Another time he was in an altercation that his girlfriend provoked in a parking lot and the cops would not do one damn thing, even though my brother almost died from the beating. In fact, when I went down to show them the evidence on my brother's car that those goons had been beating on his car, they just said we had done it ourselves and were lying. Why we would be, we have no idea.

So, yeah, I have a really low opinion of the cops in my area and honestly? My experiences have been mild compared to others.

[sakabatou]

14. Pretty friendly for the most part.

[damnedifIknow]

15. Not bad compared to others

still arrogant and maybe need a lesson in rights but other than that I've only heard of a few cases of brutality. How many do you need though? City, county, state, park.

[logosoco]

16. As a middle aged woman who mainly drives an old mini van, I am almost invisible to

cops anywhere!

I live in an unincorporated city in a large semi-rural (70% redneck) county just next to St. Louis county. The deputies here deal mainly with meth makers (an apartment on the street next to us blew up about 10 years ago, the EPA had to get in on that one!).

I did witness the tail end of a beating they gave my neighbor. He called them himself because he was drunk and was kicking up his own back door. I talked to his wife afterward and she assured me he did not beat her, but I guess it's still domestic abuse. But they didn't have to use such brutal force.

A couple of years ago, there was a kidnapping/jewelry store event. It was shocking because this is such a low crime area. The deputies handled it very well, no one got hurt, they caught the "bad guy". They ended up catching them using a strip tack on the road about a mile from my house. It was pretty freaky, like a movie.

So, I guess around here it is sort of a wash! Good cop/bad cop!

[hunter]

17. trigger happy, overworked, and understaffed.

Our city ranks rather high in gun violence and murders.

When we lived in a rougher part of town I saw too much gun violence, including a police shooting. And our next door neighbor then, his oldest kid was killed in a drug deal gone bad. He wasn't a good kid, but nobody deserves that. The "war on drugs" is stupid. It only empowers the meanest, most corrupting gangsters. Our neighbor was a drunk before that but after he'd stand in his backyard naked except for an open bathrobe, staring vacantly at the car parts he'd collected, and pissing wherever. (My kids never saw that, they were not tall enough to see over the fence.)

Whenever the guns came out my wife and I would take our kids to the back bedroom and we'd play on the floor until it was over.

If there's anything nice about living in such a place, it's that the police don't sweat the small stuff so I've got loads of stories about eccentric neighbors who couldn't possibly exist in more orderly places where the police are bored and respond to trivial disturbances. There are no Officer Obies here with "27 8×10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us," not that I'm illegally dumping garbage or anything.

But I am eccentric.

[Brickbat]

18. People I know as friends. It's a small town.

[gollygee]

19. Ours has been working really hard to improve anyway

They were investigated and found to racially profile, which is typical and sad, but I was glad to see them take the report seriously, make major leadership changes, and do a ton of community building since, rather than pretend that it wasn't true or wasn't a problem or anything like that.

[840high]

20. Not bad.

[Jamaal510]

21. Don't know much about

Arcata's police force, but Oakland's has been shady for years.