The Cops Don't Need You, and They Expect...

Today I offended someone I genuinely like, enough that she left the website where I know her and may not return. I fear I presented the last straw.

What I did, on a board not intended for sociopolitical rants, was rant against law enforcement. I should not have done it there—it’s a board for a particular writing genre—but I’d just learned it happened again, to someone I know in real life, and my anger clouded my usual judgment. Which does not excuse my post.

I have apologized publicly and privately, but there’s no indication she saw either. Sigh...



I first learned this was A Thing when I was twenty-one.

A little backstory: I’d skipped a grade in elementary school, moving from an excellent school district to one that wasn’t nearly so challenging. When driver’s education classes were offered my junior year, I wasn’t old enough to do the behind-the-wheel portion of the class. I took the classroom-only part in summer school. My senior year, things went wildly off-kilter when my father became seriously ill, and whether I learned to drive was not terribly important.

Mom chauffeured me to my summer job, and I didn’t need to drive in college, where I rarely left the immediate area. My roommate and her boyfriend taught me to drive after graduation, when I needed to get a real job that wasn’t likely to be near home.

So I was newly licensed, driving home from my relatively new job in a very old car, when the police car behind me put on its red flashing light. I pulled over. I lifted my purse from the floor and put it on the bench seat next to me, knowing he’d want to see my license.

The officer was probably around thirty-five, which seemed old to me, although he was reasonably good looking if you liked the clean-cut type. I didn’t.

I rolled down my window. “Did I do something wrong?” I was sure I’d signaled my left turn.

“You went through the intersection with your turn signal on.”

“I was going to turn. That’s my driveway.” I pointed. “You’re supposed to signal a hundred feet before you turn. There’s nothing about ‘except if there’s an intersection.’”

He smirked. “I don’t want to write you up. Moving violation tickets are expensive. You ever been ticketed?” He removed the pen from a small metal clipboard with self-carboning forms in pink, yellow, and blue.

“No, sir.”

“So you’re a virgin, and I get to be your first.”

“I hope not. Cars behind me have come too close to rear-ending me when I slow for my driveway. I always signal.”

“Right through the intersection. Maybe we could find a way out of this other than a moving violation ticket.”

“I really don’t think it’s against the law.”

“That’s for the judge to decide. What size bra do you wear?”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I don’t think—”

He bent to reach through the window, his free hand grasping for my breasts. I reared away, and his fingertips barely brushed my blouse. “Come on, they’re nice. You be nice, too. You don’t want a ticket.”

“No, but…”

“That’s your driveway right there? You live alone?”

“Roommates. They’re home. Charlotte and Keith.” They were probably at work; I usually got home first.

“You have your own room?”

I did, but I didn’t want to say so. His erection pressed at the fly of his uniform, aligned with my open window when he stood straight, and he made no attempt to hide it.

“Because we could make this go away in about ten minutes, right in your room. You show me your titties, give me a little loving with that smart mouth that recites the turn signal law, and we call it a day. Tell me yes.”

I was speechless. ‘Yes’ was not on the table.

“Come on, I don’t want to write you up. What I want is to see those titties, then you show me some oral respect.”

A car nearly as old as mine pulled off the road in front of us, backed up to close the gap, and parked. My roommate Keith, who would marry Charlotte and move out the following year, recognized my car and stopped. He was beefy, with long hair, and was probably the most good-natured person I knew. Everybody liked Keith, whose round face wore a permanent smile.

He got out and sauntered up to the cop. He wasn’t smiling. “What seems to be the problem, officer?”

“Step away from the car,” the cop said.

Keith must have seen the distress on my face, because he did not back down. “I don’t think so. You want me to stay, Maryn, or go inside and call Mom’s lawyer? He’ll pick up until six.”

“Stay,” I said.

The cop closed his citation notebook and poked the pen back in its holder. “I’ll let you off with a warning,” he said and stomped back to his patrol car.

He’d never looked at my license.

After I’d told Keith, Charlotte, and some friends at work what happened, everyone seemed to agree I should have gotten his name, found witnesses, called the newspaper, the mayor, the investigative TV reporter who was more about pretty than journalism. But how could I prove it? Even Keith hadn’t seen anything untoward.

Two days later, I’d hand washed my lingerie after dinner and hung it on the clothesline next to the parking for our triplex. In the morning I was running behind and I left them for the day so I wouldn’t be late for work. When I got home, the bras were gone.

It was him, had to be. I’d lived there for three years by then, and no one ever bothered my laundry or Charlotte’s, including lingerie, no matter how long we left it hanging on the line.

I took a different route home from work after that, but sometimes I’d see a patrol car parked on our quiet street for a half hour or so, which I’d never noticed before. Was it him? I didn’t know. It made me supremely uneasy, and when it was there, I tried not to leave the house in case it was him and he followed me.



Years later, married and in another city, I went to a bridal shower that got fairly wild as these things go. The mothers of the bride and groom had left, along with others of their generation, leaving the remaining young women to drink to excess, talk loud over the music, and later enjoy a pair of male strippers, one of whom had sex with the maid of honor.

Which is beside the point. The point is, alcohol erased any reservations among friends of friends we didn’t know well or had met only hours earlier. I learned that Camilla,the bride’s best friend, had a cop pull her over for leaving her lane. She felt sober after one drink, but she’d had a previous arrest for DWI. After the police officer had that information, he said he could arrest her or she could give him a blow job. She chose the blow job and considered it a good deal.

Another woman I’d only met that night heard the end of the story, clarified what she’d understood, and said it happened to her sister Penny, only she’d been scared rather than pragmatic, begging the cop to let her go with a warning. He wouldn’t. She’d been laid off over a month ago and couldn’t afford to pay a fine, so she did it. He’d been older, at least fifty, and fat, and it turned her away from oral completely. Her boyfriend broke up with her when she would no longer do what she’d done before so often.



Fast forward to many years passing, to yet another city. A young woman whose wedding I’d attended two years earlier was speeding on a stretch of road where literally every vehicle goes over the limit by twenty miles an hour except when it was icy.

Margaret and her husband were having both financial and marital troubles; unknown to her, Travis’s hours had been cut to part time before he was fired for drinking on the job. Instead of telling her about either one, he’d continued to leave the house in his business clothes and spent his days drinking, using the money in the bank account where they were saving for the down payment on a house, until it was gone. He stole cash from her purse and sold things in their apartment, including wedding gifts. Finally he’d had a health crisis that landed him in the ICU, directly related to long term alcoholism, and of course he had no health insurance because he had no job and had hidden it from his wife.

A faithful wife, Margaret told her boss she needed to be at the hospital. He agreed she could take as much unpaid leave as she needed and he would hold her position for her. Margaret didn’t know where next month’s rent and car payment were going to come from, and the hospital bill had already reached five figures. Recently she’d returned to a part-time night job she’d had in college, working at a twenty-four hour grocery store. She was on her way there when the cop pulled her over.

The police officer didn’t stop any other cars speeding, only Margaret’s. He directed her to pull over in the parking lot of a defunct business, where he told her she was getting a ticket for speeding, that he’d clocked her doing fifty-two in a thirty-five zone, and could she afford a ticket?

Already crying, she said she couldn’t. He proposed another solution. She cried all the way through it and could not read his name tag through her tears, but she gave him the blow job.



And this is why I needed to rant about police, about the way the job seems to draw a certain kind of man who feels it’s his right to force women to give him head or take an unjustified ticket, or to use needless force against black men, trans women, and the mentally ill because he can. All the while, the good officers who make up the majority know about the monsters in their ranks yet cannot do what it takes to rid law enforcement of the bad ones, because they’re powerless against the system and the union that protects them all, monsters and saints alike.