Hmm, my comments seem to have stirred a few folks up. Let me clarify a little bit. I'm always as respectful as possible to an officer. I don't want his job, and he doens't get paid enough. He can't actually prevent a crime without getting himself in a heap of trouble because any decent public defender can provide enough doubt to get him off. No one can see into the future.
I wouldn't be offended that the nurse called the cops. If the girl was a lunny, what was the nurse going to do about it? I wouldn't be upset about having for officers waiting on me. If I were one of them, I sure wouldn't go in alone. I would be offended if an officer had to ask, in this day and age, why a lady was carying a sidearm. That's just a stupid question to ask. It's none of his buisness, and he knows it. Thus I would politely say "because I can"
If you are going to play the "I know my rights" card, then you had better really know your rights, and you better be ready for a long drawn out battle. In the end, you can take the cop who's going to teach you a lesson, and make him wish he'd never even heard of being an LEO, but it's going to be a long hard road. Besides that, he has plenty of days where he already feels that way, so what's the point?
A good cop is good at asking questions and reading people. Whether I'm up to no good or not, if I don't give him an answer then there's not a lot that he can go on. He either has to have a warrent, or my permission to do much of anything. If I'm running drugs, and I'm dumb enough to have it in plain sight, then I'm stupid and I'm going to jail whether I say anything or not. If I'm stupid enough to have it in the trunk, and tick the officer off, then he can detain me long enough for a K9 unit to show up, then I'm going to jail. If I have it in a locked container in my trunk, then the cop is screwed without a search warrent. Tell me that doesn't suck.
Brian's case is a good one. The law doesn't say that you have to have two functioning lights on your liscense plate. It says that you have to have A liscense plate light. It doesn't even say that it has to be shining light on the plate. It just has to be there, and be on. The cop can pull you over and let you know that you have one light that's burned out. That's it. Now if the officer approaches the window, and the guy is a criminal and a moron, then yeah, he's probably going to jail. I'm sure it happens a lot, and I'm glad it does. If the guy has half a brain, and keeps his mouth shut, then he's probably going to go right on down the road. It also goes to show just how easy it is for a bad apple to really mess things up for a regular person. If you give the officer a "bad vibe" then he knows what kinds of questions to ask that are vague enough to get the permission that he needs to do what he wants. Before you know it, he's going through your care with 3 other officers and there's nothing you can do about it because you opened your mouth. Next thing you know, he finds a joint that one of your 17 year old son's basket ball buddies dropped in the car by mistake last weekend, and now you have to answer for it.
Last time I was stopped, I was adimitedly speeding. Just had a big fight with my wife, and I was driving a little to fast on an strech of road that I wasn't real familiar with. I came around a curve, and all of the sudden I was in a small town with a deputy sitting right there in a drive way. I saw him pull out in my rear view, so I found a safe place to pull off the road and get us both out of traffic, and I waited on him to catch up to me. We spoke, he thanked me for stopping and waiting on him, he checked my info, let me know that one of my liscenes plate lights was burned out, and that my plates would be expiring soon. We thanked each other, and we were both on our way. I didn't give him permission to search or do anything, and I was polite and curtious so he didn't ask for it. He noticed my 9 month old pointer (named Kimber) in the cab, but didn't notice the 1911 sitting between her and I. He didn't notice the empty holster on my hip (under my shirt) when he was showing me the burned out light, and he didn't notice the spare mag printing in my left front pocket. All because I stopped and waited on him.
Problem with things today is that we expect someone else to fix the problems for us. I'm normally a pretty peacefull guy, but I promise you one thing. If a guy raped my sister, you won't be pulling him over for any kind of traffic violation. But that's a completely different thread.
Mark