> "For the first eight or nine years I was the most pulled-over man in America," he said. "It was constant."
> Often officers simply wanted photographs.
> Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation.
> His favorite stop happened in a small mountain town in West Virginia.
> A traffic light turned red. Braithwaite stopped. The light turned green and he made a leisurely turn through the intersection.
> A few moments later, flashing lights appeared behind him.
> A police officer marched up to the banana and delivered the news.
> "'The reason I pulled you over, that light back there, you peeled out.'"
Their job is to take advantage of their authority to have fun at the expense of the time of citizens?
I'll happily live in a world where this is the extent of police authority abuse.
If you tolerate small abuses, and let people get accustomed to abusing their power in small meaningless ways, the abuses will only grow.
> ... the abuses will only grow.
SCOTUS made race-based Kavanaugh Stops legal. Stipping a banana on wheels is a much lower bar
I can assure you, pulling over the banana stand is not the road to death camps. The death camps are.
Roads don’t start at their end.
And it didn’t start there in Germany, either banana cars or death camps.
Maybe not death camps, but it is inextricably tied to real abuses. I don't see how you ban "driving while black" stops without also banning these.
You also can’t ban these without making it impossible to stop 99% of real issues either.
A giant banana car is the definition of unusual behavior, after all.
"Unusual" behavior should not be justification for any police interaction.
Society doesn't benefit from policing "Weird".
Society (broadly) disagrees, and even trivial examples would have you agreeing with them if you thought it through.
If a cop saw someone hiding in your bushes at 2am - stop and check it out, or nah?
Society broadly agrees, enough that it's illegal in the US to stop someone just for "unusual behavior." You have to have an actual concrete reason to suspect someone of a crime. Not that police always follow the law on this.
The problem isn't the severity of the infraction, it's the lack of respect for the rule of law, and an institutionalized acceptance of that practice.
The prioritization of a respect for authority over a respect for the rule of law is notoriously problematic in small town america in very real ways.
If only.
Sounds like a fun way to make a lot of friends in law enforcement :)
Right, there's definitely not a bunch of pressure from the fact that they can throw you in jail for basically anything and probably get away with shooting you if they really wanted that would get in the way of a real meaningful relationship...