I guess I'll come out of the closet...sort of... I attached a photo of me taken 10 years ago, just before I retired. Most of my cop friends ride motorcycles, and we always gave bikers a break when we could as long as they didn't give us a hard time first. Yup, motorists give the cops a much harder time than vice versa. I did that job for 28 years and the bad cops were few and far between that I worked with in the Tampa Bay Area.
I've been given a couple of cheap tickets when I was a teenager, went to court, pled my case and was found not guilty on both. But on the other hand, when I was 18 on my '66 Honda 160, I was stopped at a red light and a Metro-Dade motor officer was stopped in the oncoming lane. For some reason, I thought my light turned green (it didn't) and I took off. When I got stopped near my home, the officer was laughing his butt off. He said "don't you realize you ran the red light right in front of me?" I said no but that I saw him across the intersection. I happened to be coming home from my phone company job, splicing cable underground....no food this time, but still dirty from 12 hours in a manhole!
He said I seemed like a nice kid (lots of yes sirs, no sirs), but that he had to write me a ticket for something. So he told me to walk across the street with no crosswalk (quiet street), and wrote me a $5 ticket for jaywalking... I had many good experiences with cops when I was kid and returned the favor many times when dealing with nice people. .
