Walking and Driving While Dark

Walking and Driving While Dark

This section bothers me that I have to write it but at the same time, the more that people know that things like this happen daily might one day make a difference. I couldn’t document a story of my life without including at least a bare bones account of my run-ins with the law.

· I was walking down the street to the bus stop in California and got stopped there twice by policemen, saying that I fit the description of some guy who had passed off a bad check at the bank. I have never seen such a search for someone that passed off a bad check, although in truth, I can’t say that I haven’t either. Regardless, after the second time of showing them my ID and sitting on the sidewalk like a common criminal for them to find out twice that I was not the guy, the police apologized to me and then said that they should give me $5 for my trouble.



· I was followed for 20 minutes down the same road, a road that changes speed limit 5 times, and anyone that is not from the area would not know that. Fortunately, I did, sine I traveled every day to work via this road. When the cop finally pulled me over, I asked him why he had stopped me. He told me that he wanted to make sure that the right people were in his town. I told him that in that case, this wrong person was about to leave his town.



· I got 2 tickets due to Identity Theft (someone used my name when stopped by the police). One time that this happened, I was in California when the ticket was issued and the other time one happened when I was an hour away at work. For the latter ticket, the person’s physical description was of someone 60 pounds lighter than I, with green eyes and an inch shorter than me. The cop who issued me the ticket was present when I was pointing all of this out to the prosecutor, and the cop says, “Oh, I should have caught on to that”. Well, I wished that he had caught on to it before I had to miss time from work and find some town that I have never heard of before.



· I was driving in a lily-white town with a white girl at night, which is always just asking for trouble. I was stopped by a policeman of course. Bravely, I asked the cop why he had stopped me. He told me that I was speeding. I told him that this wouldn’t make any sense because I was lost in a town that I did not know so if anything, I was going too slowly. Then he tried to tell me that he stopped me because I did not have my seat belt. I let him know that I had taken it off so that I could get my wallet out of my book bag in the backseat. Then he told me that my taillight was out. This I could not argue, not because I knew it to be true, but because I could not get out of the car and prove it false at the same time without incurring a beatdown.



It happens to every man of color. It just sucks that when it happens to you.