Told by police that being outside at night is probable cause to pull me over and question/weapons ch

Originally posted by dawnstar
keep riding your bike, when they stop you, strike up a conversation with them, mention that you usually ride you bike to the store after you get out of work at that time....
eventually, they might get so that they see ya, know ya, know what you are doing, and well.....leave ya alone.....

I disagree, Don't know if anyone made a similar response yet, but cops shouldn't need to know who you are to operate fairly. To have a need to know a citizen personally, in order to justify not pulling them over is backwards logic. This is justifying police to presume all citizens are potential criminals, allowing them free reign to pullover and harass any/all to their hearts content. Presumably we are potentially criminals, however they need to have legal justification to act on this presumption. What is this legal justification you ask? Evidence. Witnessing a citizen with contraband, and conducting illegal/suspicious activity. And no, we don't live in nazi germany or v for vendetta's britain (yet), so if you're legally an adult, there are no laws enforcing a curfue so long as you're in a public place (at least in mine and everywhere else in america I presume). So as citizens we have the right to be out 24-7 un-harrassed. That's my opinion at least.

reply to post by draft.phunk


Ehhh I agree and I dont.

Its the job of the police to be nosey, plain and simple.

Its within the rights of the indiviudal we are dealing with to tell us to eff off and leave.

We can stop cars / individuals if they are in an area where crime has been reported (IE car break ins or vandalism. Must be specific and within the scope of the stop).

Because some million dollar home was broken into in the next city does not give us the right to stop all people out late at night. Whenever I made contact with individuals in that manner (on bikes and what not) I just chatted them up. Asked how they were doing, whats going on tonight blah blah.

I took that opprotunity to let them know we have had vandalism / theft / etc in the area and if they observed anyhting out of the ordinary to give us a call so we can check on it. As far as identifying them I always gave them my first name and asked for their first name.

Was I checking them out to see what they were up to? i was
Did I do it in a threatening or power trip manner - I did not.

The ups and downs of doing that are present. On one side its possible we are tipping the criminals off that we know about crime in the area. It work in our favor though where if we did catch them at a later time, we could always go back and check for our contact time and if anything was messed with during that time frame.

The up side is if they are not the theft gang, then we had a good personal contact with the citiens we serve (age is not a determining factor of how I view or treat people btw. they are citizens of the city, and because of that are my boss as well). Building that trust up does allow for them to be comfortable passing along information.

win win in my book.

however, the officers who act like jack wagons while doing that ruin it for the rest of us.

reply to post by sremmos


The elites are getting scared because they damn well know they have been caught with thier hand in the cookie jar and more people are waking up to the tyrants. They have obviously sent out orders to the police etc... its a shame the police are not yet truly awake and still blindly following orders even if those orders are obviously in favour of tyranny.